Encryption still protects data, even from NSA, experts say

Though the National Security Agency spends billions of dollars to crack encryption technologies, security experts maintain that properly implemented, encryption is still the best way to maintain online privacy.

The Guardian newspaper and other media outlets last week published stories based on internal internal NSA documents that explain how the spy agency bypasses encryption technologies by using backdoors, brute force attacks, lawful intercepts via court orders, and partnerships with tech vendors.

The reports, based on documents leaked to reporters by former NSA-contract employee Edward Snowden, suggest that many encryption algorithms now widely used to protect online communications, banking and medical records, and trade secrets have been cracked by the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

Steve Weis, chief technology officer at PrivateCore and holder of a Ph.D in cryptography from MIT, said despite the NSA activities, the mathematics of cryptography remains very hard to crack.

He suggested that it's likely that the NSA managed to break through insecure and outdated implementations of some encryption technologies.

For example, the documents suggest that the NSA built a backdoor into an NIST-approved encryption standard called Dual EC DRBG, which is used to generate random numbers. Weis noted that the Dual EC DRBG standard has been available for six years and has been rarely used since two Microsoft engineers discovered the NSA backdoor, Weis said.

It remains unclear whether NSA experts have the ability to crack more robust encryption technologies, he said. "So far, I've not seen anything to suggest than an algorithm like AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) has been broken," Weis said.

"When properly implemented, encryption provides essentially unbreakable security," said Dave Anderson, a senior director with Voltage Security, a provider of encryption technology.

"It's the sort of security that would take implausibly powerful supercomputers millions of years to crack. But if it's carelessly implemented, and the key management processes are not sound, this security can be reduced to the level where a hacker with a mid-market PC can crack in a few hours at most," he said an email to Computerworld.

Anderson said the NSA may have been able to take advantage of flaws in key management processes that support the encryption, rather than cracking the cryptography itself, he said. It's possible that the NSA can decrypt financial and shopping accounts, but it can happen only if the cryptography was improperly implemented through faulty, incomplete or invalid key management processes, he said.

Dave Jevans, founder and CTO of Marble Security, a maker of mobile security technology, said some of the concerns raised by the NSA documents are based on a misunderstanding of the facts.

Most email, web searches, Internet chats, and phone calls are not automatically encrypted, so the NSA or anyone else can merely scan online traffic to access them, he said.

The main vulnerability to encrypted traffic is key management, Jevans said. Encryption keys are long, randomly generated passwords that can encrypt and decrypt Internet traffic. "Stealing the key is like stealing a password," he said.

The NSA's enormous financial resources and manpower allow it to effectively go after encryption keys and key management systems rather than break the math behind encrypted code, he said. "It's about a billion times more effective," Jevans noted.

Despite the recent revelations, encryption remains the best way to protect online data, Weis contends.

Concerned companies should consider using open source technologies like Open SSL—whose code is always visible to developers—rather than commercial software, which is more vulnerable to NSA backdoors, he said. "The code is there for people to audit and you can see the changes. At least you have some assurance that there is no intentional vulnerability" built into the software, he said.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld.
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Here's how to best secure your data now that the NSA can crack almost any encryption

The latest Snowden-supplied bombshell shook the technology world to its core on Thursday: The NSA can crack many of the encryption technologies in place today, using a mixture of backdoors baked into software at the government’s behest, a $250 million per year budget to encourage commercial software vendors to make its security “exploitable,” and sheer computer-cracking technological prowess.

To some extent, it’s not surprising to hear that the U.S. spy agency is doing spy agency stuff but, given the recent surveillance revelations and the fact that other countries likely have similar capabilities, the news is certainly worrying. To make matters worse, it came just a day after Pew reported that 90 percent of Internet users have taken steps to avoid surveillance in some way.

All is not lost, however. While the stunning reports failed to name exactly which companies and encryption technologies have been compromised by the NSA, you can minimize the chances that your encrypted communications will be cracked by the government—or anyone else. Read on.

Now that we know that corporations—or at least individuals in corporations—have worked with the NSA to build backdoors into encryption technology, privacy buffs should give commercial encryption technology (such as Microsoft’s BitLocker) the hairy eye.

NSA headquarters.

You’re better off using tools that employ open-source or public-domain encryption methods, as they need to work with every vendor’s software and, in the case of open-source encryption, can be scrutinized for potential security flaws.

With that in mind, here are some tools worth checking out:

Truecrypt for encrypting sensitive files, folders, and entire drives on your PC.GPG, an open-source implementation of the OpenPGP protocol used to encrypt email communications. Be sure to read up on why standard-compliant email messages can never truly be secure, though.TAILS, a.k.a. The (Amnesic) Incognito Live System, a Linux distribution built with security and anonymity in mind. TAILS comes packed with numerous privacy and encryption tools baked in, including Tor, which allows you to browse the web (mostly) anonymously and access a Darknet of so-called “Hidden Services” that grant anonymity to both web servers and web browsers. Bruce Schneier—a longtime security guru who has actually read the documents detailing the NSA’s encryption-busting methods—recommends using Tor and Hidden Services to thwart NSA surveillance. TAILS is meant to be used as a live CD, which means you can boot it from a disc or USB drive, and your data is wiped when you power off your system.Off-the-record messaging, or OTR, a cryptographic protocol for encrypting and authenticating instant-messaging communications. The protocol uses AES and SHA-1 standards and comes baked into TAILS and is recommended by Schneier even in the wake of the NSA revelations. Here’s a list of IM software that supports OTR.

Proprietary encryption tools created overseas may—may—also be less likely to have installed NSA-friendly backdoors into their software. This morning, I received an email from Boxcryptor, the superb (and Germany-based) cloud-storage encryption tool, reassuring me that there is no way for the company to snoop on its customers, as it encrypts files using private RSA security keys stored only on users’ private PCs, then transmits the already-encrypted files using HTTPs.

Beyond encryption, most of the advice in PCWorld’s How to protect your PC from Prism surveillance still applies. Note, however, that the New York Times report on the NSA’s crypto-cracking abilities suggest that VPN technology and the ever-popular SSL web protocol have been two encryption methods particularly targeted by the government. (Schneier suggests using TLS and IPsec whenever possible on the web-communication front.)

Even so, using the tips in that article will make your browsing much more secure in general, not just the NSA or foreign governments.

Also check out PCWorld’s guide to encrypting (almost) everything, which is chock full of handy-dandy encryption tips, though many rely on proprietary—not open-source—technology. While closed-source solutions may not protect against The Man and his super-encryption-cracking eyes, they’ll help keep everyone else out of your business.

Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils.
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Schneier on NSA's encryption defeating efforts: Trust no one

The U.S. National Security Agency’s efforts to defeat encrypted Internet communications, detailed in news stories this week, are an attack on the security of the Internet and on users’ trust in the network, some security experts say.

The NSA and intelligence agencies in allied countries have found ways to circumvent much of the encryption used on the Internet, according to stories published by The New York Times, ProPublica and the Guardian.

The NSA, the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and other spy agencies have used a variety of means to defeat encryption, including supercomputers, court orders, and behind-the-scenes agreements with technology companies, according to the news reports.

The reports, relying on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that many tech companies are collaborating with the spy agencies to “destroy privacy,” said cryptographer and security specialist Bruce Schneier. “The fundamental fabric of the Internet has been destroyed.”

The new revelations should raise major concerns from Internet users over who they can trust, Schneier added. “I assume that all big companies are now in cahoots with the NSA, cannot be trusted, are lying to us constantly,” he says. “You cannot trust any company that makes any claims of the security of their products. Not one cloud provider, not one software provider, not one hardware manufacturer.”

It doesn’t appear that the NSA is defeating encryption by brute force but by “cheating” by attempting to build backdoors into systems and to strong-arm companies into giving it information, Schneier says.

Digital rights group the Center for Democracy and Technology echoed some of Schneier’s concerns, with CDT senior staff technologist Joseph Lorenzo Hall calling the NSA’s encryption circumvention efforts “a fundamental attack on the way the Internet works.”

NSA headquarters

The NSA has been working for years to build backdoor vulnerabilities into encryption standards and technology products, the stories say. A representative of the NSA didn’t respond to a request for comment on the stories.

Hall criticized those efforts. “In an era in which businesses, as well as the average consumer, trust secure networks and technologies for sensitive transactions and private communications online, it’s incredibly destructive for the NSA to add flaws to such critical infrastructure,” he says in an email. “The NSA seems to be operating on the fantastically naïve assumption that any vulnerabilities it builds into core Internet technologies can only be exploited by itself and its global partners.”

The New York Times story this week, citing a Guardian report from July, says Microsoft has worked with the NSA to provide the agency with pre-encryption access to Outlook, Skype. and other products.

Microsoft has repeatedly denied helping the NSA break encryption on its products. The company complies with legal court orders for information on its customers and will provide agencies with unencrypted customer information residing on its servers if ordered by a court to do so, a spokeswoman said.

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith, in a July blog post, detailed the way Microsoft responds to court surveillance orders.

“We do not provide any government with direct access to emails or instant messages,” Smith wrote then. “Full stop.”

CDT’s Hall defended Microsoft’s approach. “It seems pretty clear that Microsoft is legally compelled to do this and would not otherwise do it voluntarily,” he says.

But Matthew Green, a cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, suggested Microsoft is due for scrutiny on encryption security, if encryption has been compromised, as the recent news stories suggest. Most commercial encryption code uses a small number of libraries, with Microsoft CryptoAPI being among the most common, he wrote in a blog post.

“While Microsoft employs good (and paranoid!) people to vet their algorithms, their ecosystem is obviously deeply closed source,” Green wrote. “You can view Microsoft’s code (if you sign enough licensing agreements) but you’ll never build it yourself. Moreover they have the market share. If any commercial vendor is weakening encryption systems, Microsoft is probably the most likely suspect.”

Microsoft IIS software runs on about 20 percent of the Internet’s Web servers, and nearly 40 percent of the SSL servers, while third-party encryption programs running on Windows depend on Microsoft APIs (application programming interfaces), Green noted.

“That makes these programs somewhat dependent on Microsoft’s honesty,” he says.

The good news for privacy-minded Internet users is that security researchers questioned whether the foundations of cryptography itself have been compromised. Some encryption protocols are vulnerable, but it’s likely that the NSA is attacking the software that encryption is implemented with or relying on human mistakes, Green wrote.

“Software is a disaster,” he added. “Hardware isn’t that much better. Unfortunately active software exploits only work if you have a target in mind. If your goal is mass surveillance, you need to build in security in from the start. That means working with vendors to add backdoors.”

Any compromises are unlikely to be related to weakness in the underlying cryptography, added Dave Anderson, a senior director at Voltage Security.

“It seems likely that any possible way that the NSA might have bypassed encryption was almost certainly due to a flaw in the key management processes that support the use of encryption, rather than through the cryptography itself,” he said by email. “So, is it possible that the NSA can decrypt financial and shopping accounts?  Perhaps, but only if the cryptography that was used to protect the sensitive transactions was improperly implemented through faulty, incomplete or invalid key management processes or simple human error.”

Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service.
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