Edit: Changed “the government” to “governments”
I mean, people say use end to end encryption, VPN, Tor, Open Source Operating System, but I think one thing missed is the hardware is not really open source, and theres no practical open source alternative for hardware. There’s Intel ME, AMD PSP, so there’s probably one in phones. How can people be so confident these encryption is gonna stop intelligence agencies?
Yeah, we don’t. It’s generally hard/impossible to prove the nonexistence of something. Similar as with God. It’s unlikely, but we can’t prove he doesn’t exist with certainty. These proofs only work for very simple and contained systems.
We don’t. The point is to reduce attack surface relative to target value. People use a VPN for piracy, for example, not because it’s totally secure, but because rights holders generally aren’t going to bother going after a single person when they’d have to go thru a VPN provider as well. OTOH someone doing it on clearnet is being logged by their ISP and the data is right there. OTOOH, the three letter agencies are absolutely going to bother if they have a tip that you’re doing something really dangerous to the status quo.
TL;DR: It’s like IRL security. If somebody really wants your shit, they’ll find a way to get it. The point is to make it generally not worth it.
Today I learned you have 3 hands
It’s difficult to know that for sure, which is why (e.g.) the US government wants to make sure that there is domestic chip manufacture with a completely controlled supply chain to make hardware for classified communications. It can help to consider the difference between targeted surveillance (spending millions to tap the President’s phone, to get big juicy national secrets) and dragnet surveillance (tapping everybody’s phone so that you can have dirt on Joe Schmoe if he does something interesting later, even if he is of no particular interest right now). Hardware backdoors would be used mostly for targeted surveillance.
Stuff like VPN’s and encrypted apps can be of considerable help against dragnet surveillance, which is what the civil privacy community mostly cares about. If you think you might be a subject of targeted surveillance, you have to be much more paranoid. Not just hardware backdoors in your computer, but suspicious white vans on your street, microphones in your flower pots, FBI agents under your bed, the whole bit.
There are some countermeasures you can take against hardware backdoors (electromagnetically isolate a computer from the network and transfer data from it by floppy disc or similar) but basically you’re in a different world if you’re dealing with this.
You mght like the book “Security Engineering” by Ross Anderson (older editions free online and still very good: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/book.html and scroll down). It goes into this stuff, has lots of good overviews even if you gloss over the technical parts, and will generally help you see clearly in the topic.
We will never have a way of knowing for sure. There are stories of government agencies famously requesting backdoor access to Apple devices, seemingly because they can’t get in otherwise, and Apple refusing, however they end up getting access on their own eventually. But who knows how much of that is even true? Government agencies are historically manipulative when it comes to public narrative, so anything made public by them should be taken with a hefty grain of salt
The side of corporation is corrupt as well because they use it for marketing.
What about that thin shiney metallic woodwind instrument? And the musician who plays it?
We know they do, actually.
All US companies provide the NSA with backdoors. All modern AMD and Intel CPUs have the ability to run remote code signed by their manufacturer and snoop into memory.
Put the two things together and now you know.
I’m not aware of us knowing that they provide
backdoorsvulnerabilities to the NSA. If US companies have data, then they’re legally obliged to make it available to the NSA (PATRIOT and CLOUD Act). The NSA may also separately develop backdoors (e.g. EternalBlue). But that the NSA coerces US companies to actively attack their customers, is news to me.It’s been a minute but I feel like Snowden revealed a program like that. A quick search gave me PRISM which kinda fits the bill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
Hmm, I just realized that “backdoors” in my previous comment had somewhat of a double-meaning. They do provide the NSA access to data that they have on their servers. In that sense, a backdoor exists, which is also what this PRISM article confirms.
But knowingly integrating vulnerabilities and making these available to the NSA for attacking customer devices, that is another shtick entirely. And I’m not finding anything in that article that says so (although I only read the parts that seemed relevant).
Yes this is something I’m more interested in learning as well. Data access to servers by adversaries can be largely mitigated with E2E encryption and VPN use so that even if, for example, the NSA wanted data on certain servers, unless they had an encryption key, would be largely meaningless (unless metadata wasn’t encrypted). We largely know that if LE wants data, they can get a court order to hand it over.
What I’d like to know is if there has been any evidence of “hardware” backdoors like what you now describe. I haven’t been able to find evidence of any successful attempts by major agencies/corporations, but I guess part of a successful attempt involves the public not knowing that it exists.
My threat model has me using an iPhone with Lockdown Mode & Advanced Data Protection enabled. I am wondering if I need to reassess my model to potentially go for the Pixel with GrapheneOS.
According to my research, the iPhone with these specific settings for reducing attack surface and encrypting everything that gets put onto servers is more than enough for myself (admittedly a pretty stringent threat model). But would also like to hear what others think.
Fair point. Building secret backdoors for the gov is a different beast all together.
Seeing these Powerpoint slides again makes me realize that grapic design is really their passion.
Well, there is this time a few months ago where the Chinese government hacked AT&T and Verizon using the mandatory backdoors the US government left for wiretaps…
https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b
That’s the reason leaving backdoors is generally a really, really bad idea, because you don’t know who else can use them
Okay so here’s my take on it not that anybody asked.
There are likely back doors in all computerized Networked devices.
There is likely some identifying information being sent back to random servers from a myriad of places.
That being said, you are not worth the time to directly observe.
Most likely, all of this data goes into a large database where they analyze trends and look for people that are outside of various tolerance zones.
Other than that, all of your data is just noise, grist for the grist Mill.
It is only when you become a person of interest who is worth devoting the time to directly analyze that these risks escalate to the point where you should have concern about it.
99.9999% of us are just not important enough to pay attention to.
Also the government is not all one monolithic entity. Just because the NSA has a backdoor doesnt mean theyll hand that information out to anyone who asks. Maybe if the CIA fills out a ton of paperwork, but if its the FBI theyll laugh in their faces and tell them the data doesnt exist.
Lol that FBI/CIA government bureuacracy was what (allegedly) led to the 9/11 hijackers getting through the cracks in the fishing net.
Cause the FBI are the keystone cops of the intelligence world. Theres a reason they spun off a whole new agency rather than just give the FBI unlimited resources for the war on terror.
The Jersey drone story is a great example.
The FAA posted a a security update for the Picatinny area a few weeks ago. Now where did that come from? Some governmental org that wanted to do testing.
But the rest of government was unaware, so could honestly say they didn’t know anything about the drone activity.
Here’s the most down to earth comment in the whole post
Pretty much, yeah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
Person of interest? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
I’ll be cool with that if some badass vigilante would actually save my life.
If the government wants to snoop, they can just get a Certificate Authority in the boat and MITM whoever they want.
In my region there are laws that telecoms have to provide a way to let the government snoop, but the government doesn’t use it without probable cause.
Some people think a VPN will protect them, because the provider doesn’t log, but all the government needs is the VPN keys and they can intercept all traffic between the VPN and the user and log it themselves.
…the g9verenment doesn’t use it without probably cause YET.
The way politics are going lately, that might all change in an instant. Not that there’s anything you or I can do about it. I’m not trying to fearmonger here, just that you shouldn’t be putting any Qurans or Communist manifestos on your Onedrive account, that’s all. Be mindful.
I’ve worked for the government. They had me managing 78 full AWS accounts for various departments. Me, 1 guy. And I had to explain basics of tech to everybody in charge of the cloud accounts.
Our gov can barely manage itself, let alone some next level tech on millions of devices and keep track of it all. They couldn’t even get me a new mouse without 2 forms, 1 online ticket, and 2 levels of approvals.
Yep but the capable agencies know what they want
Which government is this?
There’s no way to check the whole thing, but you can totally pick a component and reverse engineer it, which is something people do quite a bit. When spying is found, it’s usually a private company doing it.
The NSA doesn’t care about your search history, but advertisers do. (and the government ever did, they’ll just call up google)
Wasn’t that something Asange or Snowden blew the whistle on? That the CIA or NSA or something actually has backdoors in pretty much everything, along with all kinds of spyware floating around the net?
I think they were more like Verizon and other carriers logging metadata. Google and Apple, in their server side services. And the government has physically tapped internet cables. HTTP was not widespead at the time, and corporations were (either forced, or willingly) co-operating with authorities for mass surveillance. Also, most devides had no encrption for data at rest. You know, that type of thing.
I don’t think the snowden leaks ever said anything about a hardware backdoor outside of targetted attacks (Correct me if I’m wrong). So it was widely understood post-snowden era that using an open source OS + encryption for both at rest and communications would be good enough for non-targeted attacks.
But my question asks if governments could be listening to everyone as a mass surveillance non-targeted attack, via hardware backdoors
If they listen to everyone, it would show up in some way, using power and bandwidth. Even using like steganography wouldn’t hide it very well IMO. One exception being windows ofc 😅 where they spy on you for sure already.
Wasn’t it that mega share guy (king dotcom or something) that figured out his PC was compromised because his ping skyrocketed on CS-GO?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor
If I was a government intelligence agency I’d probably sell my soul to get access to these…
I get that they have legitimate use cases for corporations, but why are there virtually no consumer grade CPUs without that stuff ? Surely they would be less expensive and no one would miss the features on their home computers.
They do.
This is probably going to be a very unpopular opinion but I am much angrier at a corporation having my data than a govermment and the former is much easier to avoid
A few years ago they had rerouted shipments from Cisco to the NSA and then forward to the intended recipients. Not just a few parcels, but truckloads.
