Looking more closely at this, the backdoor is almost certainly based on the back-doored random number generator, Dual_EC_DRBG, which is implemented as NIST SP 800-90A.
From Wiki:
>>> NIST SP 800-90A ("SP" stands for "special publication") is a publication by the National Institute of Standards and Technology with the title Recommendation for Random Number Generation Using Deterministic Random Bit Generators. The publication contains the specification for three allegedly cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators for use in cryptography: Hash DRBG (based on hash functions), HMAC DRBG (based on HMAC), and CTR DRBG (based on block ciphers in counter mode). Earlier versions included a fourth generator, Dual_EC_DRBG (based on elliptic curve cryptography). Dual_EC_DRBG was later reported to probably contain a kleptographic backdoor inserted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA).
From Cavium's NIST FIPS-140-2, Section 3.3 [1]
Approved and Allowed Algorithms:
The cryptographic module supports the following FIPS Approved algorithms.
*SP800-90 CTR DRBG Deterministic random number generation 32
Is there any proof that Dual_EC_DRBG is backdoored?
All I know is that Dual_EC_DRBG can be backdoored. And there are indeed suspicions, it was known from the start that not only Dual_EC_DRBG could be backdoored, but that it was rather weak to begin with. So, how could it be adopted as a standard?
Now it seems that everyone takes the backdoor as a given. Is there any proof? Ideally the keys themselves (that would make it undeniable), but more credibly, leaks that show usage or potential usage of the backdoor.
But what seems surprising to me about that story is that the potential for a backdoor was known even before the adoption of Dual_EC_DRBG as a standard. Any credible enemy of the state would know that and use something else, and be very suspicious of imported products using it. The ones following NIST recommendations would be allies, but why would you want allies to use weak ciphers?
> Is there any proof that Dual_EC_DRBG is backdoored?
The algorithm is bad: it's complicated and slow.
The competing algorithms were much simpler, much more secure by construction, and much faster. Most importantly, there was no obvious way to backdoor the competing algorithms, but there's a hilariously trivial way to backdoor Dual_EC_DRBG.
Ergo: the only reason you would ever devise or use Dual_EC_DRBG is to introduce a backdoor capability. There is no other believable benefit or reason.
But rest assured, the NSA promised that they destroyed all copies of the private key they used to generate the public key for Dual_EC_DRBG.
Oh wait, you thought you could generate your own pair and throw away the private key? Ha-ha... haaa. No. That's not compliant with the "standard", which the NSA forced upon the industry, and/or literally bribed companies with millions of dollars to accept willingly.
It's as obvious a backdoor as you could possibly have.
It has constants chosen with NSA input which weaken it - and which were called out a long time ago as doing so.
It isn’t a back door in the sense of ‘poke the code in a certain way and voila’, rather ‘if you know the counterpart to this constant, you can guess what values the RNG spits out at statistically improbable rates’.
You’d never know if someone was doing so unless they admitted it or someone got arrested in a way that was only possible if they’d used
it. Which good luck.
If you believe you are the only one who can break the cipher, then it doesn't really matter if your allies are using them - after all, spying happens even among ostensibly allied or friendly countries.
I think most people's source of proof is the Snowden leaks, but I haven't actually read it or corroborated, and most backdoors should be deniable anyway - it'd be real dumb if they weren't. I think strong circumstantial evidence is really the only thing one can go on.
The cryptographic module uses the CTR_DRBG,
not the withdrawn Dual_EC_DRBG. The Dual_EC_DRBG was withdrawn in 2014, but this Security Policy for this module was submitted well past that for FIPS 140-2 revalidation, and the CMVP would not have let a testing lab submit it at all.
Since Calvium got rewarded for being "Completely Enabling for _______ encryption chips used in VPN and Web encryption" and then lists these on its Nitrox III and Nitrox V (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F6Y_zDQWgAAj96s?format=jpg)
AES (128/192/256 CBC, GCM)
Triple-DES (CBC, 3-key)
SHS (SHA-1/256/384/512)
HMAC (SHA-1/256/384/512)
RSA (KeyGen, SigGen and SigVer; PKCS1 V1 5; 2048bits)
ECDSA (PKG, SigGen and SigVer; P-256, P-384, P-521)
CTR DRBG (AES-256)
HASH DRBG (SHA-512)
CVL Component (IKEv2, TLS, SSH)
CKG (vendor affirmed)
Does that imply that the NSA may have kleptographic (algorithm substition, or secondary key) attacks or something different for all of these?
> Looking more closely at this, the backdoor is almost certainly based on the back-doored random number generator, Dual_EC_DRBG, which is implemented as NIST SP 800-90A.
This doesn't have to be backdoored.
It could simply be a bug in their hardware RNG that uses something that isn't public to break it.
Or something that Cavium did not realise was vulnerable.
Sorry, what does it even mean for a random number generator to have a backdoor? Is it leaking your generated keys to the NSA? Does it have some arbitrary code execution vulnerability?
More interestingly, Cavium (now Marvell) also designed and manufactured the HSMs which are used by the top cloud providers (such as AWS, GCP, possibly Azure too), to hold the most critical private keys:
Ayup. We use AWS CloudHSM to hold our private signing keys for deploying field upgrades to our hardware. And when we break the CI scripts I see Cavium in the AWS logs.
Now I gotta take this to our security team and figure out what to do.
I'd be surprised if you get anything more than generic statements about how they take security very seriously and they are open to suggestions, but avoid addressing the mentioned concerns directly (and this applies to all cloud providers out there, not just AWS).
I'm sure a few others here would like to see their response as well.
The Intel Management Engine always runs as long as the motherboard is
receiving power, even when the computer is turned off. This issue can be
mitigated with deployment of a hardware device, which is able to disconnect
mains power.
Intel's main competitor AMD has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure
Technology (formally called Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of
its post-2013 CPUs.
Is there anyone here who actually thought cloud provider HSMs were secure against the provider itself or whatever nation state(s) have jurisdiction over it?
It would never occur to me to even suspect that. I assume that anything I do in the cloud is absolutely transparent to the cloud provider unless it's running homomorphic encryption, which is still too slow and limited to do much that is useful.
I would trust them to be secure against the average "hacker" though, so they do serve some purpose. If your threat model includes nation states then you should not be trusting cloud providers at all.
Lots of people believe that. They believe truthfully you can get to the level of AWS, MS, Google, Facebook or Apple whilst standing up to the nations that host those companies. I've walked into government employees in the hallways of tiny ISPs, I see no reason to believe at all that larger companies are any different except for when easier backdoors have been installed.
At my Fortune 250, our threat model apparently includes -- rather conveniently and coincidentally -- everything! Well, everything they make an off-the-shelf product for, anyway. It makes new purchasing decisions easy:
"Does your product make any thing, in any way, more secure?"
"Uh... Yes?"
"You son of a bitch. We're in. Roll it out everywhere. Now."
It's interesting to consider the people who, with the very same set of facts, come to completely opposite conclusions about security.
For instance, Amazon has a staff of thousands or tens of thousands. To me, that means they can't possibly have a good grasp on internal security, that there's no way to know if and when data has been accessed improperly, et cetera. To others, the fact that they're a mega-huge company means they have security people, security processes and procedures, and they are therefore even more secure than smaller companies.
For one of the two groups, the generalized uncertainty of the small company is greater than the generalized uncertainty of the large. For the other, the size of the large makes certain things inevitable, where the security of smaller companies obviously depends on which companies we're talking about and the people involved. More often than not, people want to generalize about small companies but wouldn't apply the same criteria to larger companies like Amazon.
There's a huge emotional component in this, which I think salespeople excel at exploiting.
It fascinates me, even though it's a never-ending source of frustration.
I think there’s such a thing as plausible deniability here. We didn’t know for certain so we weren’t culpable, but now that it’s public record, we really have to do something about it or risk liability with our customer data.
You don't need to think about this in a binary fashion. You can split your trust across multiple entities. Different clouds, different countries, or a mix of cloud and data centers you own.
This breeds the familiar scenario where a group will start saying the link between the two is so clear that there must be a connection. Then you’ll get another group calling the first group conspiracy theorists, and say it’s just a coincidence of probability.
Narrative control and information modeling is so powerful it’s scary.
Now get yourself some half-decent psyops and contaminate the first group with supporting voices that emphasize weaker evidence, use poor logic, name-drop socially questionable sources, and go out of their way to sound ridiculous.
HSMs are mainly for compliance, where a customer needs to check a regulatory box, because some rules says you must use a HSM. The more standard it is, the easier it is to demonstrate to the auditor that you've checked the box.
I believe they do this because most critical softwares are American, and as long as the NSA has better offensive capabilities, it's better for the NSA if international defenses are low.
I don't think china or Russia really have good offensive capabilities, so as long as it is the case, this helps the US maintain some form of cyberweapon supremacy.
As long as china or small black hats don't do harm, they will not raise security standards.
If they manage to put a backdoor in any software or hardware you use you are affected. They could spy on you and trade that with your government or just lose the keys and now anyone can do it.
The tweet seems to imply that the entire Ubiquiti Networks line of network hardware could be compromised.
That's a shame; I was thinking of installing some in my house.
I'm sure that Ubiquiti's customers will not be happy if they find out that the US Govt can access their private data.
In a world where local PD can kick my door in, shoot me in the face, and the news will report that I had it coming because I own a gun, I find it hard to care that the IC can burn a technical access backdoor to access my private data.
I'm currently replacing my network equipment with Mikrotik, not because I believe it to be safer than Ubiquity, but because then at least it's made in the EU.
But now I'm thinking: Is it better that the US is spying on me in Europe, vs. having EU governments do it? I feel like I'd be somewhat more safe from the US, compared to if my own government decides to spy on me. Maybe I should look into Chilean network equipment, I can't imaging that they'd have much interest in my online activities.
> But now I'm thinking: Is it better that the US is spying on me in Europe, vs. having EU governments do it? I feel like I'd be somewhat more safe from the US, compared to if my own government decides to spy on me.
> In recent years, documents of the FVEY have shown that they are intentionally spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other, although the FVEYs countries claim that all intelligence sharing was done legally, according to the domestic law of the respective nations.
So in practice, it's entirely irrelevant: your data will end up Hoovered up by someone, coated with a veneer of legality, and provided back to your government to act on (or not).
Don't be too interesting to your government, I guess?
Europe doesn’t make that many chips (unfortunately), chances are high there’s US/Chinese components in there too. Since your network hopefully sees mostly encrypted traffic anyway (even if you're running Plex on the LAN, that should use SSL), I‘d be more concerned about HW in desktops, notebooks and tablets.
In democratic countries we also have rights against (unjustified) spying by our governments. Sounds like a better long-term plan for everyone is to make them work. Especially when even the ideal equipment won't do much against metadata spying by ISPs and cellphone carriers...
okay, so assuming the US gov can access my private LAN data due to my use of the Ubiquiti USG as router/firewall, USG wifi APs etc, of what form would this data exfiltration take? can we please explore/explain how this "compromise" would happen in real-life.
if i were sniffing for outbound WAN traffic as root on the unix-like that the USG run, would i see the exfiltration traffic? or is this [supposedly/apparently] happening at a lower layer that an OS can't see i.e. some kind of BMC or BIOS layer?
wouldn't such traffic also have to navigate the varieties/restrictions of DOCSIS etc? or are they also compromised?
is the worst-case scenario here some kind of giant C2 network with waves hands tons of compromised lower-than-OS mini pieces of firmware exfiltrating data over waves hands compromised network providers hardware into the giant NSA AWS cloud?
Would be an interesting experiment to see what an oscilloscope sees on the wire vs what tcpdump records... There was a story somewhere on the net where someone complained thay they wanted to include a do not record payload parameter in tcpdump and couldn't get it through.
Pretty sure only the EdgeRouter and some of the older Unifi Security Gateways use Cavium chips. Most of the newer stuff (like the Dream Machine line) I don't think are anymore. None of the Unifi APs did either I don't think (the U6 ones have Mediatek chips in them)
If you're not under the threat cone of nation state surveillance (like trying to exfiltrate the radar-asborbing paint formula on the F35) then I wouldn't be too concerned.
"That's not the point! It's about privacy!"
Sure. I'll choose it ignore the fact that our civilization is somehow still functioning in a post-nuclear world.
It's not about privacy, it's about security. If there's a backdoor in a HSM or network interface, that backdoor can be used by others as well. That might start with foreign nation states, but might eventually leak to regular private persons or entities as well.
A backdoor is an extra attack vector with often very unfavorable properties that you as a user are unaware of.
A Mann is being executed in Saudia Arabia for tweeting a negative tweet about the government to his tiny following. Not exactly someone who thinks they are a target of a nation state.
100% agreed. If you’re concerned about privacy, being tracked online by corporations is a bigger concern than the the NSA. If you’re the target of an NSA investigation, you’re already fucked. Changing your network equipment is not going to help.
> If you're not under the threat cone of nation state surveillance
The average reader may be surprised by how far this cone can extend in some circumstances.
It has been established that the NSA conducts industrial espionage [0], under the cover of national security [1]. To what degree the term "national security" narrows down the scope of any surveillance measures is likely unfamiliar to the laymen, but an NSA representative gave a short description on the agencies views to that regard in 2013:
"The intelligence community's efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security." [1]
While it affirms that it does not steal trade secrets, the NSA reserves the right to pass on critical information about economic developments towards policy makers, who then can use this knowledge in their decision making.
Notable examples of industrial espionage conducted by the NSA consisted of spying on EU antitrust regulators investigating Google for antitrust violations [1], alleged espionage of business conducted by brazilian oil giant Petrobas [2], international credit card transactions [3], SWIFT [4], and the infamous allegations of espionage against european defense company EADS [5].
It's noteworthy that this short list only comprises cases that got attention of the media, the actual list of targets in europe was much higher, about 2000 companies in europe, many of them defense contractors.[5]
So, to summarize, it may be much easier to fall into this cone, than one would assume. The agency is also at odds with it's own claims as this this excerpt from a Guardian article [2] clearly shows:
"The department does not engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber," the agency said in an emailed response to a Washington Post story on the subject last month.
[...]
"We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries' economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets."
But he again denied this amounted to industrial espionage. "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line." [2]
To me these statements are mutually exclusive: How is providing policy makers with insights from foreign politics and possible industrial espionage (i.e. not necessarily actual technologies, but research objectives of foreign companies) not giving an advantage to domestic companies, if those policy makers act appropriately?
Trying to understand what crypto is the network hardware itself performing? TLS is end to end, even if you run a VPN on the router the keys were not generated there probably
Ubiquiti is all cloud based. If the government wants in to your auto-updating ubnt hardware, it's just a simple court order away. They don't need a backdoor.
That's part of the reason I've started moving away from their routers - I still have an Edgerouter but never went to the Dream Machine or USIP routers. At the moment the OPNSense appliances [1] which are made by the company that sponsors the fork (Deciso B.V.) are my pick for that. They're an EU company, and the thing runs fully open source software on a commodity embedded AMD chip.
I'm still using the access points, since I can run my own controller still, either virtualised in a container or VM, or a raspberry pi and you don't have to connect it to the cloud. I haven't found anything better, TP Link seem to have some interesting looking stuff but I worry about the security given they're based in Shenzhen...
It may be auto-updating by default, but that can be trivially disabled. Likewise, their cloud connectivity/management is optional. I'm running without issue multiple air-gapped Ubnt networks using their self-hosted controller software.
That was an insider trying to extort the company by pretending to be an outside hacker. He then posed as a whistleblower to try and throw investigators off the trail.
Ubiquiti has many other problems besides this. The worst is their vendor lockin, where even basic network operations are not possible if you happen to have any non-ubiquiti hardware in your network. You should stay away.
I ran UBQT hardware with mikrotik router and third party firewall. UBQT replaced old frankenstein hardware that had the worst channel management etc.
Everything got so much better, customers issues dropped to almost zero (sometimes was hundreds of issues a day)
We always had other vendor for part of the network, and that had no impact.
Wonder if agreeing to enable NSA backdoors they agreed to be compensated when eventually that fact is leaked. "If nobody starts buying your chips, don't worry, we will! ... and then promptly throw them into the recycling bin"
Also interesting is if Marvell knew their acquired tech had this "cool feature".
The agreement with the NSA is more likely like this: "if you don't comply, you will get arrested / fined for whatever reason (crypto exports issues or failure to comply with the law), maybe even by another authority, or journalists may discover your little things about X.
If you comply we may help you with some tips occasionally to make sure our partnership is working well, or just not reveal your trade secrets to your competitors"
Yea, people forget we literally have a secret kangaroo FISA court being abused to issue "national security letters" with rubber stamp that demanded compliance and threatened to throw you in jail for resisting and/or talking about it. The Patriot Act largely was responsible for it, but even now they've wiggled to other avenues since the Patriot Act expired.
Another tragic blow to the environment and economy.
We treat these stories as if they were simple matters of politics and
tech. But the blast radius is huge. When this happened to Cisco, and
their value dropped to about 7% of the market they created, I passed
massive dumpsters of Cisco gear in the car park, prematurely torn out
of racks and consigned to crushing as e-waste.
Has anyone done a serious cost analysis of just how hard this hits?
If a foreign entity sabotaged our industry this way we'd take the
battle right to them.
How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade. Are the journalists just that *uncurious* about the deep contents of the documents they hold exclusive access to? Was this some kind of organizational failing?
I suspect when a trove of documents is big enough, newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents. I mean, even on this tech forum hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.
Maybe the moral of the story is that future snowdens should leak to selected law firms instead of selected journalists? If there's one organization designed to comb through large documents for details and understand the impacts to potential parties, it is law organizations. Put 2-3 in time competition to make cases out of the documents and it will be a scramble race for justice.
> newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents
So.. what's your case here? It would be so expensive to host and publish the documents that they would be unable to recoup their investment based upon lack of interest?
> hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.
Oh.. I don't know.. maybe that's because no one has reported on it and explained why it would be important?
There's a lot of circular reasoning present to create excuses for an entity that really doesn't need or deserve it.
The snowden leak was huge and reverberated for weeks. There were lots of followups.
However at the time it was the more sexy things like tapping google's fibre and backdoors in cisco's kits that were more interesting. This is because the public could understand those things and therefore it sold papers.
The difference between "cisco, dell and many other leading manufacturers shipped backdoors in their kit" and "cavium the small provider you've not really heard of" is large.
Most people reading the snowden stuff will have assumed that the NSA had put in backdoors to most things.
Snowden leaked a shit ton of documents, the vast majority of which had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of NSA wrongdoing. Journalists then had to go through and try to figure out what these documents actually meant (which they frequently misunderstood). Obviously they're still doing it to today.
As a general rule when criminal conspiracies are taken to task, they don't retain a right to privacy for their communications that aren't about the criminal conspiracy. Rather it all comes out in court. I understand why Snowden released the way he did, and given how it kept attention on the subject for longer than Binney/Klein it was probably the right call. But there should have also been an escrow/intent to dump the whole trove raw after some time period.
I don't think the journos were lazy, and I don't think there was an organisational failing. The Guardian, in particular, evidently fell out with Snowden and his collaborators; they turned on him. I assume that was coordinated with Washpo and Spiegel. That is: I think there was a decision made, to stop publishing information from the Snowden trove.
I don't know what the reason for the betrayal was. I'm pretty sure Alan Rusbridger knows though. He resigned as Editor-in-chief shortly after these events.
I don't get why whistleblowers rely on newspaper publishers to unpack their leaks for the public; it's not as if the press are known for either their honesty or their scruples.
Are you kidding? WaPo serves the intelligence community.
>After creation of the CIA in 1947, it enjoyed direct collaboration with many U.S. news organizations. But the agency faced a major challenge in October 1977, when—soon after leaving the Washington Post—famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein provided an extensive exposé in Rolling Stone.
Citing CIA documents, Bernstein wrote that during the previous 25 years “more than 400 American journalists…have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” He added: “The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception.”
Bernstein’s story tarnished the reputations of many journalists and media institutions, including the Washington Post and New York Times. While the CIA’s mission was widely assumed to involve “obfuscation and deception,” the mission of the nation’s finest newspapers was ostensibly the opposite.
The WaPo is relentlessly pro-US and pro-'intelligence community' in its writings today, too. It's transparent. Idk how it could be missed, even without knowing the history. Just read a couple articles about contemporary whistleblowers or US involvement in the Syrian civil war or the war in Ukraine or whatever.
There was also a German ex-journalist (dr. Udo Ulfkotte) who wrote a book about how journalists (in Germany and EU I suppose) are “bought” by intelligence agencies like the CIA:
I personally had my eyes opened during the run up to the Iraq war in 2022. Pretty much every single news org with national recognition seemed completely incapable of the smallest amount of critical thought. They would basically parrot the whitehouse/etc press releases, and never question a single thing in them.
So, the behavior you point out is enabled by politicians who show such bad judgment in such a critical area, and yet few if any lost their positions over their votes. I personalty have been wondering for the past few years how many of our leaders are actually there of their own accord, rather than put there by various backroom cabals of business leaders and intelligence (foreign and domestic) agencies that want to put their thumbs on the scale with a representative or dozen. How would you ever know, except by their behavior.
This happens a lot. I've read stories too about British journalists being cultivated by their intelligence services to make sure that the leaks they want to be published get published and the leaks they don't want published don't.
There's a lot of pontificating about the virtuous, important, selfless job journalists do, but when they're manipulated to such an extent not just by the Government and intelligence agencies but also by their corporate sponsors... It's hard to not be a bit cynical...
It's quite a bit more subtle than that. News organization have their sources that are in the intelligence community. They use each other. Sometimes the journalist wants to use their sources for information. Other times their sources feed them disinformation disguised as information. Other times they want a back channel to leak some real information but can't be seem as coming from a government source. Being a good journalist is hard and often doesn't pay very well.
WP is a very close ally to the government agencies in general. That's where it gets those juicy "anonymous government sources claim ..." news. If WP all of sudden wanted to prevent democracy from dying "in darkness" as their motto says, it would mean to start digging a lot harder going against the government as a whole. Don't think they are prepared for it.
Well yes, why do you think the noise died after the initial hype of Snowden leaking the docs? Do you honestly believe the mechanisms of for-profit journalism lets journalists be journalists? They got to eat and in this world you don't eat by covering yesterdays news.
NSA didn't have to lift a finger. Wait a few weeks and people move on to the next story, this should not be a shocking revelation to anyone.
The British intelligence agencies forced the Guardian to literally shred the laptop with the contents while they were in the swing of running headlines about the things it was revealing.
While the USA and the UK are different, I suspect there was a bit more difficult for the NSA than "didn't have to lift a finger".
According to Appelbaum, the person publishing these new leaks,
>Primarily these documents remain unpublished because the journalists who hold them fear they will be considered disloyal or even that they will be legally punished
Whether that's true I can't say. But as a reminder, despite constant claims that Assange is being extradited over hacking charges, something like 17 of his 18 charges are over publishing documents.
WaPo, NYT, et. al. are tied to DOD and the intel community. They are the anonymous sources that provide many of their story ideas as well as quotes and sourcing. That doesn't come for free.
>How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade.
I personally suspect that security services visited the newspapers a few days after the leak [1], and ever since then, every article has been about stuff that wouldn't be a surprise to rival security services.
Sure - it was a surprise to the public. But rival security services I'm sure would expect US controlled backdoors in US made technology.
Some of them are deputies for the state. State-run-media, or Media-run-state, whichever you prefer.
The FBI and CIA had agents inside Twitter and Facebook. Of course they have them inside news agencies as well. Part of it over time is access-media, the ones that play ball get the stories and info, the others get weeded out.
mainstream journalists are incredibly unreliable. it's absolutely clear to everyone that you cannot trust nyt and similar publications. i never read them anyway, and when I do come across articles on topics I'm knowledgeable about, i'm appalled by how wrong they are.
Modern journalists are just terminally online twitter heads.
"Why go out or talk to anyone when I can just stay home and be on twitter all day!?!"
It's the absolute worst outcome for journalism, and none of publications seem to care. If I had a publication the first thing I would do is ban twitter use (and probably go bankrupt because of it.)
>i never read them anyway, and when I do come across articles on topics I'm knowledgeable about, i'm appalled by how wrong they are.
I never do that, except when I do. What kind of soapbox are you trying to stand on. It looks more like a cardboard box collapsing under the weight of your own hubris.
I get the suspicion of news outlets of any kind. It doesn't matter what stream the journalists are fished out of, but they cannot all be subject matter experts in all subjects. This is also an expectation full of hubris on your part.
exactly.
When I read things I KNOW about, it's incredibly obvious that the news entertainment business (which WP and NYT and CNN and Fox all are) exist to serve the prejudices of their audience.
A few times I made the mistake to let myself be interviewed by a newspaper who wanted an "expert" on something (flattering, but meh); something copletely benign and harmless, nothing political. They twisted my words to serve up stuff that fit what their "normal reader" already believed about the world.
It's crazy to me that people pay for access to these outlets. I wouldn't pay for any content except from individual journalists and a few very small outlets, and even then, would immediately stop if things ever turn for the worse.
Well, COINTELPRO certainly didn't : we've got recent examples about how the FBI monitored the Parler group discussions that were planning the January 6 2021 United States Capitol rally - including convincing some of the most risky elements to not participate, and (supposedly) warned Washington law enforcement about it well in advance.
Which is fine I guess, as long as it doesn't go into the more abusive examples listed.
One thing that jumped at me when (re-?)reading the letter to MLK from the FBI : first you have some very informal speech :
"look into your heart", "you are done", "you are [] an evil, abnormal beast", "there is only one thing for you left to do"
Then SUDDENLY : "You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance)."
Lol, talk about a change in tone, I wonder if MLK noticed it ? (The specific reason being Christmas, but still...)
Supposed news organizations openly employ spooks as commentators on things like foreign policy.
Journalists knowingly report lies, acting as the mouthpiece of the government.
We know at least one news organization had the whole Epstein story locked down and they buried it because they were afraid they’d lose access to the royal family for future news/puff pieces.
You think you hate journalists enough, but you don’t.
In the US, we have this passionate fantasy about Woodward and Bernstein and the Post and the Pulitzer and the movie and Redford and Hoffman and the Academy Award, about how the Press played the part of the "fourth estate" as the Founders intended, and rooted out a corrupt politician, and forced him to resign. It's all bullshit. The people who broke into the Watergate Hotel were CIA, Woodward was formerly CIA, and "Deepthroat" was a Deputy Director of the FBI. It was all a deep state plot to get rid of Nixon. Any time the deep state wants to get rid of a politician, the "press" does its "job" by exposing things. When the deep state likes a politician, the "press" ALSO does its "job" by covering things up. Look absolutely no further than Hunter Biden. The hypocrisy is utterly astounding, even to someone who is deeply cynical at this point. The rest of the US needs to wake up to the fact that the press is just another branch of the deep state, and stop pretending that there's ANYTHING useful being fed to us through ANY of the large media corporations.
> about how the Press played the part of the "fourth estate" as the Founders intended
The rest of your post is quite the bullshit (easily probable with publicly accessible archives bullshit at that), but this is also wrong. The mythological god-like creatures that crafted America as their divine powers ordained it didn't "intend" for the press to be "the fourth power". That term was first used after the US revolution, and in the UK. You're just retconing stuff into your mythology, and everyone knows that doesn't work and leaves a poor taste.
Wow, the deep state is so powerful that they got Nixon to say on tape that he was going to try to get the CIA to falsely use national security as an excuse to stonewall an FBI investigation. Poor innocent Nixon was no match for their telepathic powers.
Readit News
From Wiki: >>> NIST SP 800-90A ("SP" stands for "special publication") is a publication by the National Institute of Standards and Technology with the title Recommendation for Random Number Generation Using Deterministic Random Bit Generators. The publication contains the specification for three allegedly cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators for use in cryptography: Hash DRBG (based on hash functions), HMAC DRBG (based on HMAC), and CTR DRBG (based on block ciphers in counter mode). Earlier versions included a fourth generator, Dual_EC_DRBG (based on elliptic curve cryptography). Dual_EC_DRBG was later reported to probably contain a kleptographic backdoor inserted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA).
From Cavium's NIST FIPS-140-2, Section 3.3 [1] Approved and Allowed Algorithms:
The cryptographic module supports the following FIPS Approved algorithms.
*SP800-90 CTR DRBG Deterministic random number generation 32
1: https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/projects/cryptographic-modu...
All I know is that Dual_EC_DRBG can be backdoored. And there are indeed suspicions, it was known from the start that not only Dual_EC_DRBG could be backdoored, but that it was rather weak to begin with. So, how could it be adopted as a standard?
Now it seems that everyone takes the backdoor as a given. Is there any proof? Ideally the keys themselves (that would make it undeniable), but more credibly, leaks that show usage or potential usage of the backdoor.
But what seems surprising to me about that story is that the potential for a backdoor was known even before the adoption of Dual_EC_DRBG as a standard. Any credible enemy of the state would know that and use something else, and be very suspicious of imported products using it. The ones following NIST recommendations would be allies, but why would you want allies to use weak ciphers?
The algorithm is bad: it's complicated and slow.
The competing algorithms were much simpler, much more secure by construction, and much faster. Most importantly, there was no obvious way to backdoor the competing algorithms, but there's a hilariously trivial way to backdoor Dual_EC_DRBG.
Ergo: the only reason you would ever devise or use Dual_EC_DRBG is to introduce a backdoor capability. There is no other believable benefit or reason.
But rest assured, the NSA promised that they destroyed all copies of the private key they used to generate the public key for Dual_EC_DRBG.
Oh wait, you thought you could generate your own pair and throw away the private key? Ha-ha... haaa. No. That's not compliant with the "standard", which the NSA forced upon the industry, and/or literally bribed companies with millions of dollars to accept willingly.
It's as obvious a backdoor as you could possibly have.
Even if the NSA didn't use it as a backdoor -- I'm crying with laughter now -- the Chinese hacking group APT5 definitely did: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/12/22/on-junip...
It isn’t a back door in the sense of ‘poke the code in a certain way and voila’, rather ‘if you know the counterpart to this constant, you can guess what values the RNG spits out at statistically improbable rates’.
You’d never know if someone was doing so unless they admitted it or someone got arrested in a way that was only possible if they’d used it. Which good luck.
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I think most people's source of proof is the Snowden leaks, but I haven't actually read it or corroborated, and most backdoors should be deniable anyway - it'd be real dumb if they weren't. I think strong circumstantial evidence is really the only thing one can go on.
The cryptographic module uses the CTR_DRBG, not the withdrawn Dual_EC_DRBG. The Dual_EC_DRBG was withdrawn in 2014, but this Security Policy for this module was submitted well past that for FIPS 140-2 revalidation, and the CMVP would not have let a testing lab submit it at all.
This isn’t the back door.
Hard to tell what it is, more information is needed.
For example, these devices were validated for the completely appropriately named "SonicOS 6.2.5 for TZ, SM and NSA". Gotta appreciate the irony.
Cavium CN7020 Hash DRBG
Cavium CN7130 Hash DRBG
Cavium Octeon Plus CN66XX Family Hash DRBG
Cavium Octeon Plus CN68XX Family Hash DRBG
I don't know if that's hardware support or just a software validation - but it's still interesting that they validated it.
https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/Cryptographic-Algorithm-Valid...
AES (128/192/256 CBC, GCM)
Triple-DES (CBC, 3-key)
SHS (SHA-1/256/384/512)
HMAC (SHA-1/256/384/512)
RSA (KeyGen, SigGen and SigVer; PKCS1 V1 5; 2048bits)
ECDSA (PKG, SigGen and SigVer; P-256, P-384, P-521)
CTR DRBG (AES-256)
HASH DRBG (SHA-512)
CVL Component (IKEv2, TLS, SSH)
CKG (vendor affirmed)
Does that imply that the NSA may have kleptographic (algorithm substition, or secondary key) attacks or something different for all of these?
This doesn't have to be backdoored.
It could simply be a bug in their hardware RNG that uses something that isn't public to break it.
Or something that Cavium did not realise was vulnerable.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=nybVFJVXbww
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/caviums-liquidsecur...
Now I gotta take this to our security team and figure out what to do.
I'm sure a few others here would like to see their response as well.
https://github.com/Ylianst
I mean, you are already in US-based cloud, so if NSA is interested, they will just request information directly, no backdoors needed.
(This is a good test for your security team, btw: if they say anything other that "we do nothing", you know its all security theater)
It would never occur to me to even suspect that. I assume that anything I do in the cloud is absolutely transparent to the cloud provider unless it's running homomorphic encryption, which is still too slow and limited to do much that is useful.
I would trust them to be secure against the average "hacker" though, so they do serve some purpose. If your threat model includes nation states then you should not be trusting cloud providers at all.
At my Fortune 250, our threat model apparently includes -- rather conveniently and coincidentally -- everything! Well, everything they make an off-the-shelf product for, anyway. It makes new purchasing decisions easy:
"Does your product make any thing, in any way, more secure?"
"Uh... Yes?"
"You son of a bitch. We're in. Roll it out everywhere. Now."
For instance, Amazon has a staff of thousands or tens of thousands. To me, that means they can't possibly have a good grasp on internal security, that there's no way to know if and when data has been accessed improperly, et cetera. To others, the fact that they're a mega-huge company means they have security people, security processes and procedures, and they are therefore even more secure than smaller companies.
For one of the two groups, the generalized uncertainty of the small company is greater than the generalized uncertainty of the large. For the other, the size of the large makes certain things inevitable, where the security of smaller companies obviously depends on which companies we're talking about and the people involved. More often than not, people want to generalize about small companies but wouldn't apply the same criteria to larger companies like Amazon.
There's a huge emotional component in this, which I think salespeople excel at exploiting.
It fascinates me, even though it's a never-ending source of frustration.
Even when you are a nation state, you still have to worry about other nation states.
[0] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/new...
Narrative control and information modeling is so powerful it’s scary.
If nothing else, at Google/Amazon scale, I’d be concerned about a third-party HSM losing data.
Also, the Cavium one was the fastest one on the market the last time I looked at this. Thales, Safenet and IBM also had them..
https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/hs-crypto?topic=hs-crypto-faq-bas...
HSMs are mainly for compliance, where a customer needs to check a regulatory box, because some rules says you must use a HSM. The more standard it is, the easier it is to demonstrate to the auditor that you've checked the box.
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https://www.marvell.com/company/newsroom/marvell-enables-ent...
It infuriates me the NSA actively works to undermine American security. Their brief is to protect us, not plant backdoors and then lose the keys.
It infuriates me that the NSA actively works to undermine International security.
Seriously.
I don't think china or Russia really have good offensive capabilities, so as long as it is the case, this helps the US maintain some form of cyberweapon supremacy.
As long as china or small black hats don't do harm, they will not raise security standards.
If they manage to put a backdoor in any software or hardware you use you are affected. They could spy on you and trade that with your government or just lose the keys and now anyone can do it.
PD:Also from outside US btw
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But now I'm thinking: Is it better that the US is spying on me in Europe, vs. having EU governments do it? I feel like I'd be somewhat more safe from the US, compared to if my own government decides to spy on me. Maybe I should look into Chilean network equipment, I can't imaging that they'd have much interest in my online activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
> In recent years, documents of the FVEY have shown that they are intentionally spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other, although the FVEYs countries claim that all intelligence sharing was done legally, according to the domestic law of the respective nations.
So in practice, it's entirely irrelevant: your data will end up Hoovered up by someone, coated with a veneer of legality, and provided back to your government to act on (or not).
Don't be too interesting to your government, I guess?
Are you a journalist working in a sensitive/dangerous area?
Do you often participate in discussions with dissident groups?
Do you frequently access content that is illegal in your jurisdiction?
if i were sniffing for outbound WAN traffic as root on the unix-like that the USG run, would i see the exfiltration traffic? or is this [supposedly/apparently] happening at a lower layer that an OS can't see i.e. some kind of BMC or BIOS layer?
wouldn't such traffic also have to navigate the varieties/restrictions of DOCSIS etc? or are they also compromised?
is the worst-case scenario here some kind of giant C2 network with waves hands tons of compromised lower-than-OS mini pieces of firmware exfiltrating data over waves hands compromised network providers hardware into the giant NSA AWS cloud?
"That's not the point! It's about privacy!"
Sure. I'll choose it ignore the fact that our civilization is somehow still functioning in a post-nuclear world.
A backdoor is an extra attack vector with often very unfavorable properties that you as a user are unaware of.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/29/saudi-arabia-man-sentenc...
The average reader may be surprised by how far this cone can extend in some circumstances.
It has been established that the NSA conducts industrial espionage [0], under the cover of national security [1]. To what degree the term "national security" narrows down the scope of any surveillance measures is likely unfamiliar to the laymen, but an NSA representative gave a short description on the agencies views to that regard in 2013:
"The intelligence community's efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security." [1]
While it affirms that it does not steal trade secrets, the NSA reserves the right to pass on critical information about economic developments towards policy makers, who then can use this knowledge in their decision making.
Notable examples of industrial espionage conducted by the NSA consisted of spying on EU antitrust regulators investigating Google for antitrust violations [1], alleged espionage of business conducted by brazilian oil giant Petrobas [2], international credit card transactions [3], SWIFT [4], and the infamous allegations of espionage against european defense company EADS [5].
It's noteworthy that this short list only comprises cases that got attention of the media, the actual list of targets in europe was much higher, about 2000 companies in europe, many of them defense contractors.[5]
So, to summarize, it may be much easier to fall into this cone, than one would assume. The agency is also at odds with it's own claims as this this excerpt from a Guardian article [2] clearly shows:
"The department does not engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber," the agency said in an emailed response to a Washington Post story on the subject last month. [...] "We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries' economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets."
But he again denied this amounted to industrial espionage. "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line." [2]
To me these statements are mutually exclusive: How is providing policy makers with insights from foreign politics and possible industrial espionage (i.e. not necessarily actual technologies, but research objectives of foreign companies) not giving an advantage to domestic companies, if those policy makers act appropriately?
[0]https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use... [1]https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/nsa-spied-on-eu-anti... [2]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra... [3]https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-exclusive... [4] https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/nsa-spying-europ... [5] https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/30/airbus_us_german_inte...
Since it was never working as advertised, do I contact them or Ubiquiti to get my refund / warranty replacements?
Or, alternatively, treat your LAN/WiFI like public internet and don't send anything unencrypted thru it
The SoC manufacturer is irrelevant.
If the USG wants in, it's just a click away in any case.
https://www.peplink.com/products/balance-20x/
I'm still using the access points, since I can run my own controller still, either virtualised in a container or VM, or a raspberry pi and you don't have to connect it to the cloud. I haven't found anything better, TP Link seem to have some interesting looking stuff but I worry about the security given they're based in Shenzhen...
1. https://shop.opnsense.com/product-categorie/hardware-applian...
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Wonder if agreeing to enable NSA backdoors they agreed to be compensated when eventually that fact is leaked. "If nobody starts buying your chips, don't worry, we will! ... and then promptly throw them into the recycling bin"
Also interesting is if Marvell knew their acquired tech had this "cool feature".
If you comply we may help you with some tips occasionally to make sure our partnership is working well, or just not reveal your trade secrets to your competitors"
we already saw this happen in public once with Qwest: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...
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We treat these stories as if they were simple matters of politics and tech. But the blast radius is huge. When this happened to Cisco, and their value dropped to about 7% of the market they created, I passed massive dumpsters of Cisco gear in the car park, prematurely torn out of racks and consigned to crushing as e-waste.
Has anyone done a serious cost analysis of just how hard this hits? If a foreign entity sabotaged our industry this way we'd take the battle right to them.
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So.. what's your case here? It would be so expensive to host and publish the documents that they would be unable to recoup their investment based upon lack of interest?
> hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.
Oh.. I don't know.. maybe that's because no one has reported on it and explained why it would be important?
There's a lot of circular reasoning present to create excuses for an entity that really doesn't need or deserve it.
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However at the time it was the more sexy things like tapping google's fibre and backdoors in cisco's kits that were more interesting. This is because the public could understand those things and therefore it sold papers.
The difference between "cisco, dell and many other leading manufacturers shipped backdoors in their kit" and "cavium the small provider you've not really heard of" is large.
Most people reading the snowden stuff will have assumed that the NSA had put in backdoors to most things.
Like how NSA collects a shit ton of data on citizens... the vast majority of which has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of wrongdoing.
I'm only pointing this out because your comment has a negative tone towards what Snowden did.
I don't know what the reason for the betrayal was. I'm pretty sure Alan Rusbridger knows though. He resigned as Editor-in-chief shortly after these events.
I don't get why whistleblowers rely on newspaper publishers to unpack their leaks for the public; it's not as if the press are known for either their honesty or their scruples.
They have an interest in drama and a platform to publish on.
>After creation of the CIA in 1947, it enjoyed direct collaboration with many U.S. news organizations. But the agency faced a major challenge in October 1977, when—soon after leaving the Washington Post—famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein provided an extensive exposé in Rolling Stone.
Citing CIA documents, Bernstein wrote that during the previous 25 years “more than 400 American journalists…have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” He added: “The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception.”
Bernstein’s story tarnished the reputations of many journalists and media institutions, including the Washington Post and New York Times. While the CIA’s mission was widely assumed to involve “obfuscation and deception,” the mission of the nation’s finest newspapers was ostensibly the opposite.
https://www.guernicamag.com/normon-solomon-why-the-washingto...
https://www.amazon.in/Journalists-Hire-How-Buys-News/dp/1944...
So, the behavior you point out is enabled by politicians who show such bad judgment in such a critical area, and yet few if any lost their positions over their votes. I personalty have been wondering for the past few years how many of our leaders are actually there of their own accord, rather than put there by various backroom cabals of business leaders and intelligence (foreign and domestic) agencies that want to put their thumbs on the scale with a representative or dozen. How would you ever know, except by their behavior.
There's a lot of pontificating about the virtuous, important, selfless job journalists do, but when they're manipulated to such an extent not just by the Government and intelligence agencies but also by their corporate sponsors... It's hard to not be a bit cynical...
Fixed that for you
I'm often remind of PG's essay on corporate PR and the media: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
NSA didn't have to lift a finger. Wait a few weeks and people move on to the next story, this should not be a shocking revelation to anyone.
While the USA and the UK are different, I suspect there was a bit more difficult for the NSA than "didn't have to lift a finger".
>Primarily these documents remain unpublished because the journalists who hold them fear they will be considered disloyal or even that they will be legally punished
Whether that's true I can't say. But as a reminder, despite constant claims that Assange is being extradited over hacking charges, something like 17 of his 18 charges are over publishing documents.
Washington Post -> Bezos -> AWS -> Cavium
Pretty simple to understand, really.
Sure - it was a surprise to the public. But rival security services I'm sure would expect US controlled backdoors in US made technology.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-rele...
The FBI and CIA had agents inside Twitter and Facebook. Of course they have them inside news agencies as well. Part of it over time is access-media, the ones that play ball get the stories and info, the others get weeded out.
It's illegal for FBI or CIA to actively target a US company. Anyone doing so would be fired for cause.
"Why go out or talk to anyone when I can just stay home and be on twitter all day!?!"
It's the absolute worst outcome for journalism, and none of publications seem to care. If I had a publication the first thing I would do is ban twitter use (and probably go bankrupt because of it.)
I never do that, except when I do. What kind of soapbox are you trying to stand on. It looks more like a cardboard box collapsing under the weight of your own hubris.
I get the suspicion of news outlets of any kind. It doesn't matter what stream the journalists are fished out of, but they cannot all be subject matter experts in all subjects. This is also an expectation full of hubris on your part.
(2010) https://weirdshit.blog/2010/07/23/cointelpro-operation-mocki...
Which is fine I guess, as long as it doesn't go into the more abusive examples listed.
One thing that jumped at me when (re-?)reading the letter to MLK from the FBI : first you have some very informal speech :
"look into your heart", "you are done", "you are [] an evil, abnormal beast", "there is only one thing for you left to do"
Then SUDDENLY : "You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance)."
Lol, talk about a change in tone, I wonder if MLK noticed it ? (The specific reason being Christmas, but still...)
No...the organization is behaving exactly as intended.
NSA also pays the owner of the Washington Post upwards of $10 billion for cloud services
Journalists knowingly report lies, acting as the mouthpiece of the government.
We know at least one news organization had the whole Epstein story locked down and they buried it because they were afraid they’d lose access to the royal family for future news/puff pieces.
You think you hate journalists enough, but you don’t.
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sure, why not. and while we're on this deluded train: Julian Assange's legal problems are not political persecution
The rest of your post is quite the bullshit (easily probable with publicly accessible archives bullshit at that), but this is also wrong. The mythological god-like creatures that crafted America as their divine powers ordained it didn't "intend" for the press to be "the fourth power". That term was first used after the US revolution, and in the UK. You're just retconing stuff into your mythology, and everyone knows that doesn't work and leaves a poor taste.