Category Archives: Internet censorship

Happy Birthday FIPR!

On May 29th there will be a lively debate in Cambridge between people from NGOs and GCHQ, academia and Deepmind, the press and the Cabinet Office. Should governments be able to break the encryption on our phones? Are we entitled to any privacy for our health and social care records? And what can be done about fake news? If the Internet’s going to be censored, who do we trust to do it?

The occasion is the 20th birthday of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, which was launched on May 29th 1998 to campaign against what became the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Tony Blair wanted to be able to treat all URLs as traffic data and collect everyone’s browsing history without a warrant; we fought back, and our “big browser” amendment defined traffic data to be only that part of the URL needed to identify the server. That set the boundary. Since then, FIPR has engaged in research and lobbying on export control, censorship, health privacy, electronic voting and much else.

After twenty years it’s time to take stock. It’s remarkable how little the debate has shifted despite everything moving online. The police and spooks still claim they need to break encryption but still can’t support that with real evidence. Health administrators still want to sell our medical records to drug companies without our consent. Governments still can’t get it together to police cybercrime, but want to censor the Internet for all sorts of other reasons. Laws around what can be said or sold online – around copyright, pornography and even election campaign funding – are still tussle spaces, only now the big beasts are Google and Facebook rather than the copyright lobby.

A historical perspective might perhaps be of some value in guiding future debates on policy. If you’d like to join in the discussion, book your free ticket here.

What Goes Around Comes Around

What Goes Around Comes Around is a chapter I wrote for a book by EPIC. What are America’s long-term national policy interests (and ours for that matter) in surveillance and privacy? The election of a president with a very short-term view makes this ever more important.

While Britain was top dog in the 19th century, we gave the world both technology (steamships, railways, telegraphs) and values (the abolition of slavery and child labour, not to mention universal education). America has given us the motor car, the Internet, and a rules-based international trading system – and may have perhaps one generation left in which to make a difference.

Lessig taught us that code is law. Similarly, architecture is policy. The architecture of the Internet, and the moral norms embedded in it, will be a huge part of America’s legacy, and the network effects that dominate the information industries could give that architecture great longevity.

So if America re-engineers the Internet so that US firms can microtarget foreign customers cheaply, so that US telcos can extract rents from foreign firms via service quality, and so that the NSA can more easily spy on people in places like Pakistan and Yemen, then in 50 years’ time the Chinese will use it to manipulate, tax and snoop on Americans. In 100 years’ time it might be India in pole position, and in 200 years the United States of Africa.

My book chapter explores this topic. What do the architecture of the Internet, and the network effects of the information industries, mean for politics in the longer term, and for human rights? Although the chapter appeared in 2015, I forgot to put it online at the time. So here it is now.

Manifestos and tech

The papers went to town yesterday on the Conservative manifesto but missed some interesting bits.

First, no-one seems to have noticed that the smart meter programme is being quietly put to death. We read on page 60 that everyone will be offered a smart meter by 2020. So a mandatory national programme has become voluntary, just like that. Regular readers of this blog will recall that the programme was sold in 2008 by Ed Milliband using a dishonest impact assessment, yet all the parties backed it after 2010, leaving no-one to point out that it was going to cost us all a fortune and never save any carbon. May says she wants to reduce energy costs; this was surely a no-brainer.

That was the good news for England. The good news for friends in rural Scotland is high-speed broadband for all by 2020. But there are some rather weird things in there too.

What on earth is “the right of businesses to insist on a digital signature”? Digital signatures are very 1998, and we already have the electronic signature directive. From whom will businesses be able to insist on a signature, and if I’m one of the legislated victims, how much do I have to pay to buy the apparatus?

All digital businesses will have “to support new digital proofs of identification”. That presumably means forcing firms to use Verify, a dysfunctional online authentication service whose roots lie in Blair’s obsession with identity. If a newspaper currently identifies its subscribers via a proprietary logon, will they have to offer Verify as an option? Will it have to be the only option, displacing Facebook and Twitter? The manifesto also says that local government will have to use Verify; and elsewhere that councils must publish planning applications and bus routes “without the hassle and delay that currently exists.” OK, so some councils could so with more competent webmasters, but don’t worry: “hundreds of leaders from the world of tech can come into government to help deliver better public services.”

The Land Registry, the Ordnance Survey and other quangos that do geography (our leader’s degree subject) will all band together to create the largest open repository of land data in the world. So where will the Ordnance Survey get its money from then? That small question killed the same idea in 2010 after Tim Berners-Lee sold it to Cameron.

There will be a levy on social media companies, like on gambling companies, to support awareness and preventive activity. And they must not direct users, even unintentionally, to hate speech. So will Facebook be fined whenever they let users like a xenophobic article in the Daily Mail?

No doubt in view of the delicacy of such regulatory decisions, Leveson II is killed; there will be a Data Use and Ethics Commission instead. It will advise regulators and develop the principles and rules that will give people confidence their data are being handled properly. Wow. We now have the Charter of Fundamental Rights to give us principles, the GDPR to give us rules, and the ECJ to hammer out the case law. Now the People don’t have confidence in such experts we’re going to let the Prime Minister of the day appoint a different lot.

The next government will further strengthen cyber security standards for government and public services, so presumably all such services will have to use expensive networks such as the NHS-wide network from BT which will expect them to manage their own firewalls without telling them how to.

But don’t worry. It will become “as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically”. There is text about working “with international law enforcement agencies to ensure perpetrators are brought to justice” but our local police force isn’t allowed to do anything effective about online accommodation fraud committed by a gang in Germany. They have to work through the NCA – who don’t care. The manifesto signals more of the same: the NCA will get to eat the SFO, which does crimes over £100m, leaving them even less interested in online crooks who steal a thousand pounds of deposit from dozens of students a year.

In fact there is no signal anywhere in the manifesto that May understands the impact of volume cybercrime, even though it’s now most of the property crime in the UK. She rather prefers to boast of the falling crime over the past seven years, as if it were her achievement as Home Secretary. The simple fact is that crime has been going online like everything else, and until 2015 the online part of it wasn’t recorded properly. This was not the doing of Theresa May, but of Margaret Hodge.

The manifesto rather seems to have been drafted in a geek-free room. And let’s not spoil the party by mentioning the impact that tight immigration targets will have on the IT industry, or for that matter on higher education. Perhaps they want us to hope that they don’t really mean that part of it, but perhaps we’d better make a plan to open a campus in India or Canada, just in case.

Video on Edge

John Brockman of Edge interviewed me in London in March. The video of the interview, and a transcript, are now available on the Edge website. Edge runs big interviews with several dozen scientists a year, with particular interest in people who do cross-disciplinary work. For me, the interaction of economics, psychology and engineering is one of the things that makes security so fascinating, as well as the creativity driven by adversarial behaviour.

The topics covered include the last thirty years of progress (of lack of it) in information security, from the early beginnings, through the crypto wars and crime moving online, to the economics of security. We talked about how cryptography can help less developed countries; about managing complexity in big projects; about how network effects lead firms to design insecure products; about whether big data can undermine democracy by empowering elites; and about how in a future world of intelligent things, security may become more about safety than anything else. Finally I talk about our current big project, the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre.

John runs a literary agency, and he’s worked on books by many of the scientists who feature on his site. This makes me wonder: on what topic should I write my next book?

“Do you see what I see?” ask Tor users, as a large number of websites reject them but accept non-Tor users

If you use an anonymity network such as Tor on a regular basis, you are probably familiar with various annoyances in your web browsing experience, ranging from pages saying “Access denied” to having to solve CAPTCHAs before continuing. Interestingly, these hurdles disappear if the same website is accessed without Tor. The growing trend of websites extending this kind of “differential treatment” to anonymous users undermines Tor’s overall utility, and adds a new dimension to the traditional threats to Tor (attacks on user privacy, or governments blocking access to Tor). There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about Tor users experiencing difficulties in browsing the web, for example the user-reported catalog of services blocking Tor. However, we don’t have sufficient detail about the problem to answer deeper questions like: how prevalent is differential treatment of Tor on the web; are there any centralized players with Tor-unfriendly policies that have a magnified effect on the browsing experience of Tor users; can we identify patterns in where these Tor-unfriendly websites are hosted (or located), and so forth.

Today we present our paper on this topic: “Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users” at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). Together with researchers from the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of California, Berkeley and International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley), we conducted comprehensive network measurements to shed light on websites that block Tor. At the network layer, we scanned the entire IPv4 address space on port 80 from Tor exit nodes. At the application layer, we fetched the homepage from the most popular 1,000 websites (according to Alexa) from all Tor exit nodes. We compared these measurements with a baseline from non-Tor control measurements, and uncover significant evidence of Tor blocking. We estimate that at least 1.3 million IP addresses that would otherwise allow a TCP handshake on port 80 block the handshake if it originates from a Tor exit node. We also show that at least 3.67% of the most popular 1,000 websites block Tor users at the application layer.

Continue reading “Do you see what I see?” ask Tor users, as a large number of websites reject them but accept non-Tor users

Can we crowdsource trust?

Your browser contains a few hundred root certificates. Many of them were put there by governments; two (Verisign and Comodo) are there because so many merchants trust them that they’ve become ‘too big to fail’. This is a bit like where people buy the platform with the most software – a pattern of behaviour that let IBM and then Microsoft dominate our industry in turn. But this is not how trust should work; it leads to many failures, some of them invisible.

What’s missing is a mechanism where trust derives from users, rather than from vendors, merchants or states. After all, the power of a religion stems from the people who believe in it, not from the government. Entities with godlike powers that are foisted on us by others and can work silently against us are not gods, but demons. What can we do to exorcise them?

Do You Believe in Tinker Bell? The Social Externalities of Trust explores how we can crowdsource trust. Tor bridges help censorship victims access the Internet freely, and there are not enough of them. We want to motivate lots of people to provide them, and the best providers are simply those who help the most victims. So trust should flow from the support of the users, and it should be hard for powerful third parties to pervert. Perhaps a useful mascot is Tinker Bell, the fairy in Peter Pan, whose power waxes and wanes with the number of children who believe in her.

Meeting Snowden in Princeton

I’m at Princeton where Ed Snowden is due to speak by live video link in a few minutes, and have a discussion with Bart Gellmann.

Yesterday he spent four hours with a group of cryptographers from industry and academia, of which I was privileged to be one. The topic was the possible and likely countermeasures, both legal and technical, against state surveillance. Ed attended as the “Snobot”, a telepresence robot that let him speak to us, listen and move round the room, from a studio in Moscow. As well as over a dozen cryptographers there was at least one lawyer and at least one journalist familiar with the leaked documents. Yesterday’s meeting was under the Chatham House rule, so I may not say who said what; any new disclosures may have been made by Snowden, or by one of the journalists, or by one of the cryptographers who has assisted journalists with the material. Although most of what was discussed has probably appeared already in one place or another, as a matter of prudence I’m publishing these notes on the blog while I’m enjoying US first-amendment rights, and will sanitise them from my laptop before coming back through UK customs.

The problem of state surveillance is a global one rather than an NSA issue, and has been growing for years, along with public awareness of it. But we learned a lot from the leaks; for example, wiretaps on the communications between data centres were something nobody thought of; and it might do no harm to think a bit more about the backhaul in CDNs. (A website that runs TLS to a CDN and then bareback to the main server is actually worse than nothing, as we lose the ability to shame them.) Of course the agencies will go for the low-hanging fruit. Second, we also got some reassurance; for example, TLS works, unless the agencies have managed to steal or coerce the private keys, or hack the end systems. (This is a complex discussion given CDNs, problems with the CA ecology and bugs like Heartbleed.) And it’s a matter of record that Ed trusted his life to Tor, because he saw from the other side that it worked.

Third, the leaks give us a clear view of an intelligence analyst’s workflow. She will mainly look in Xkeyscore which is the Google of 5eyes comint; it’s a federated system hoovering up masses of stuff not just from 5eyes own assets but from other countries where the NSA cooperates or pays for access. Data are “ingested” into a vast rolling buffer; an analyst can run a federated search, using a selector (such as an IP address) or fingerprint (something that can be matched against the traffic). There are other such systems: “Dancing oasis” is the middle eastern version. Some xkeyscore assets are actually compromised third-party systems; there are multiple cases of rooted SMS servers that are queried in place and the results exfiltrated. Others involve vast infrastructure, like Tempora. If data in Xkeyscore are marked as of interest, they’re moved to Pinwale to be memorialised for 5+ years. This is one function of the MDRs (massive data repositories, now more tactfully renamed mission data repositories) like Utah. At present storage is behind ingestion. Xkeyscore buffer times just depend on volumes and what storage they managed to install, plus what they manage to filter out.

As for crypto capabilities, a lot of stuff is decrypted automatically on ingest (e.g. using a “stolen cert”, presumably a private key obtained through hacking). Else the analyst sends the ciphertext to CES and they either decrypt it or say they can’t. There’s no evidence of a “wow” cryptanalysis; it was key theft, or an implant, or a predicted RNG or supply-chain interference. Cryptanalysis has been seen of RC4, but not of elliptic curve crypto, and there’s no sign of exploits against other commonly used algorithms. Of course, the vendors of some products have been coopted, notably skype. Homegrown crypto is routinely problematic, but properly implemented crypto keeps the agency out; gpg ciphertexts with RSA 1024 were returned as fails.

With IKE the NSA were interested in getting the original handshakes, harvesting them all systematically worldwide. These are databased and indexed. The quantum type attacks were common against non-crypto traffic; it’s easy to spam a poisoned link. However there is no evidence at all of active attacks on cryptographic protocols, or of any break-and-poison attack on crypto links. It is however possible that the hacking crew can use your cryptography to go after your end system rather than the content, if for example your crypto software has a buffer overflow.

What else might we learn from the disclosures when designing and implementing crypto? Well, read the disclosures and use your brain. Why did GCHQ bother stealing all the SIM card keys for Iceland from Gemalto, unless they have access to the local GSM radio links? Just look at the roof panels on US or UK embassies, that look like concrete but are actually transparent to RF. So when designing a protocol ask yourself whether a local listener is a serious consideration.

In addition to the Gemalto case, Belgacom is another case of hacking X to get at Y. The kind of attack here is now completely routine: you look for the HR spreadsheet in corporate email traffic, use this to identify the sysadmins, then chain your way in. Companies need to have some clue if they’re to stop attacks like this succeeding almost trivially. By routinely hacking companies of interest, the agencies are comprehensively undermining the security of critical infrastructure, and claim it’s a “nobody but us” capability. however that’s not going to last; other countries will catch up.

Would opportunistic encryption help, such as using unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman everwhere? Quite probably; but governments might then simply compel the big service forms to make the seeds predictable. At present, key theft is probably more common than key compulsion in US operations (though other countries may be different). If the US government ever does use compelled certs, it’s more likely to be the FBI than the NSA, because of the latter’s focus on foreign targets. The FBI will occasionally buy hacked servers to run in place as honeypots, but Stuxnet and Flame used stolen certs. Bear in mind that anyone outside the USA has zero rights under US law.

Is it sensible to use medium-security systems such as Skype to hide traffic, even though they will give law enforcement access? For example, an NGO contacting people in one of the Stans might not want to incriminate them by using cryptography. The problem with this is that systems like Skype will give access not just to the FBI but to all sorts of really unsavoury police forces.

FBI operations can be opaque because of the care they take with parallel construction; the Lavabit case was maybe an example. It could have been easy to steal the key, but then how would the intercepted content have been used in court? In practice, there are tons of convictions made on the basis of cargo manifests, travel plans, calendars and other such plaintext data about which a suitable story can be told. The FBI considers it to be good practice to just grab all traffic data and memorialise it forever.

The NSA is even more cautious than the FBI, and won’t use top exploits against clueful targets unless it really matters. Intelligence services are at least aware of the risk of losing a capability, unlike vanilla law enforcement, who once they have a tool will use it against absolutely everybody.

Using network intrusion detection against bad actors is very much like the attack / defence evolution seen in the anti-virus business. A system called Tutelage uses Xkeyscore infrastructure and matches network traffic against signatures, just like AV, but it has the same weaknesses. Script kiddies are easily identifiable from their script signatures via Xkeyscore, but the real bad actors know how to change network signatures, just as modern malware uses packers to become highly polymorphic.

Cooperation with companies on network intrusion detection is tied up with liability games. DDoS attacks from Iran spooked US banks, which invited the government in to snoop on their networks, but above all wanted liability protection.

Usability is critical. Lots of good crypto never got widely adopted as it was too hard to use; think of PGP. On the other hand, Tails is horrifically vulnerable to traditional endpoint attacks, but you can give it as a package to journalists to use so they won’t make so many mistakes. The source has to think “How can I protect myself?” which makes it really hard, especially for a source without a crypto and security background. You just can’t trust random journalists to be clueful about everything from scripting to airgaps. Come to think of it, a naive source shouldn’t trust their life to securedrop; he should use gpg before he sends stuff to it but he won’t figure out that it’s a good idea to suppress key IDs. Engineers who design stuff for whistleblowers and journalists must be really thoughtful and careful if they want to ensure their users won’t die when they screw up. The goal should be that no single error should be fatal, and so long as their failures aren’t compounded the users will stay alive. Bear in mind that non-roman-language countries use numeric passwords, and often just 8 digits. And being a target can really change the way you operate. For example, password managers are great, but not for someone like Ed, as they put too many of the eggs in one basket. If you’re a target, create a memory castle, or a token that can be destroyed on short notice. If you’re a target like Ed, you have to compartmentalise.

On the policy front, one of the eye-openers was the scale of intelligence sharing – it’s not just 5 eyes, but 15 or 35 or even 65 once you count all the countries sharing stuff with the NSA. So how does governance work? Quite simply, the NSA doesn’t care about policy. Their OGC has 100 lawyers whose job is to “enable the mission”; to figure out loopholes or new interpretations of the law that let stuff get done. How do you restrain this? Could you use courts in other countries, that have stronger human-rights law? The precedents are not encouraging. New Zealand’s GCSB was sharing intel with Bangladesh agencies while the NZ government was investigating them for human-rights abuses. Ramstein in Germany is involved in all the drone killings, as fibre is needed to keep latency down low enough for remote vehicle pilots. The problem is that the intelligence agencies figure out ways to shield the authorities from culpability, and this should not happen.

Jurisdiction is a big soft spot. When will CDNs get tapped on the shoulder by local law enforcement in dodgy countries? Can you lock stuff out of particular jurisdictions, so your stuff doesn’t end up in Egypt just for load-balancing reasons? Can the NSA force data to be rehomed in a friendly jurisdiction, e.g. by a light DoS? Then they “request” stuff from a partner rather than “collecting” it.

The spooks’ lawyers play games saying for example that they dumped content, but if you know IP address and file size you often have it; and IP address is a good enough pseudonym for most intel / LE use. They deny that they outsource to do legal arbitrage (e.g. NSA spies on Brits and GCHQ returns the favour by spying on Americans). Are they telling the truth? In theory there will be an MOU between NSA and the partner agency stipulating respect for each others’ laws, but there can be caveats, such as a classified version which says “this is not a binding legal document”. The sad fact is that law and legislators are losing the capability to hold people in the intelligence world to account, and also losing the appetite for it.

The deepest problem is that the system architecture that has evolved in recent years holds masses of information on many people with no intelligence value, but with vast potential for political abuse.

Traditional law enforcement worked on individualised suspicion; end-system compromise is better than mass search. Ed is on the record as leaving to the journalists all decisions about what targeted attacks to talk about, as many of them are against real bad people, and as a matter of principle we don’t want to stop targeted attacks.

Interference with crypto in academia and industry is longstanding. People who intern with a clearance get a “lifetime obligation” when they go through indoctrination (yes, that’s what it’s called), and this includes pre-publication review of anything relevant they write. The prepublication review board (PRB) at the CIA is notoriously unresponsive and you have to litigate to write a book. There are also specific programmes to recruit cryptographers, with a view to having friendly insiders in companies that might use or deploy crypto.

The export control mechanisms are also used as an early warning mechanism, to tip off the agency that kit X will be shipped to country Y on date Z. Then the technicians can insert an implant without anyone at the exporting company knowing a thing. This is usually much better than getting stuff Trojanned by the vendor.

Western governments are foolish to think they can develop NOBUS (no-one but us) technology and press the stop button when things go wrong, as this might not be true for ever. Stuxnet was highly targeted and carefully delivered but it ended up in Indonesia too. Developing countries talk of our first-mover advantage in carbon industrialisation, and push back when we ask them to burn less coal. They will make the same security arguments as our governments and use the same techniques, but without the same standards of care. Bear in mind, on the equities issue, that attack is way way easier than defence. So is cyber-war plausible? Politically no, but at the expert level it might eventually be so. Eventually something scary will happen, and then infrastructure companies will care more, but it’s doubtful that anyone will do a sufficiently coordinated attack on enough diverse plant through different firewalls and so on to pose a major threat to life.

How can we push back on the poisoning of the crypto/security community? We have to accept that some people are pro-NSA while others are pro-humanity. Some researchers do responsible disclosure while others devise zero-days and sell them to the NSA or Vupen. We can push back a bit by blocking papers from conferences or otherwise denying academic credit where researchers prefer cash or patriotism to responsible disclosure, but that only goes so far. People who can pay for a new kitchen with their first exploit sale can get very patriotic; NSA contractors have a higher standard of living than academics. It’s best to develop a culture where people with and without clearances agree that crypto must be open and robust. The FREAK attack was based on export crypto of the 1990s.

We must also strengthen post-national norms in academia, while in the software world we need transparency, not just in the sense of open source but of business relationships too. Open source makes it harder for security companies to sell different versions of the product to people we like and people we hate. And the NSA may have thought dual-EC was OK because they were so close to RSA; a sceptical purchaser should have observed how many government speakers help them out at the RSA conference!

Secret laws are pure poison; government lawyers claim authority and act on it, and we don’t know about it. Transparency about what governments can and can’t do is vital.

On the technical front, we can’t replace the existing infrastructure, so it won’t be possible in the short term to give people mobile phones that can’t be tracked. However it is possible to layer new communications systems on top of what already exists, as with the new generation of messaging apps that support end-to-end crypto with no key escrow. As for whether such systems take off on a large enough scale to make a difference, ultimately it will all be about incentives.