DEF CON 22 - Christopher Soghoian - Blinding The Surveillance State

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I'm Chris Soghoian, I work for the ACLU. Yeah. I feel you! I've been thinking about this talk for a while. Many of us have been trying to convince people and companies to encrypt their communications for a while. And the last few weeks and few years have been a really good time. There has been a lot of positive movement in the right direction and I'll talk about that today. But I want to get us all the way there. I really want to talk today about how we start to get default encryption for everything and how we really start to do damage. As a reminder, I work for the ACLU, the American civil liberties union. Last summer when I came and gave a talk, we have a table in the vendor area where you can get T-shirts like this and someone came up and said why aren't you going anything for Ed Snowden. Why aren't you helping him? My boss, Ben, who is a Snowden employer smiled and couldn't say what was happening. We've been helping Ed for some time. And I don't think it's overestimating to say -- just to say really we wouldn't be where we are now were it not for his disclosures and bravery. The amount of changes in the debate and the pressure on companies to encrypt is staggering. He couldn't be here. We don't have the Snowden 5,000 walking around the halls at DEFCON but we have it in New York. And Snowden made this a lot easier. This woman is Diane Planstin you can boo her if you like. Only at DEFCON. So she is the chairwoman of the senate intelligence committee. I'm going to read you a quick quote of hers from last year. This is after the first few Snowden story broke, as the administration and the defenders of these surveillance community really started to go on the attack and defend everyone's communication this is what she said, it's necessary for the NSA to obtain the haystack of records in order to find the terrorist needle. They need to do bulk surveillance, not because they care about our communication but because they care about the bad guys. There is a problem with this analogy and this drives the talk today and drives a lot of the work I'm doing. We are the haystack. We have the hay stake whose communications are being monitored and it's not right. We can fight in the courts which the ACLU is doing. and other organizations are doing, We can fight in congress which the ACLU and other organizations are doing. And we can also fight through technology and make it more difficult for bulk surveillance to take place. thats what this talk is about today, How do we use math and technology to prevent them from collecting the whole haystack. Going back in time to 2009. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away. If you cared about encryption on the web, 2009 was a really bad time. Things weren't good. With the exception of some banking websites that you used, most of your communications over the web were not protected with basic encryption built into all web browsers. Even your authentication could be easy for someone to steal your information. In 2009 all the big cloud computing companies and social networking sites and email providers none used SSL by default. Everyone was vulnerable to surveillance. Not just by individuals but by the state. There is a slide that I haven't included in here from GC-HQ slide deck 2009 in which they're cheering and patting themselves on the back because so many services are not encrypted. Without SSL, surveillance was a question of how to do the tap and how to process the data rather than how to break any technology or security. This is a blog post from Google in 2009. When they first announced the availability of an option, a configuration setting to force SSL in the future. This was an option that wasn't turned on by default. You had to go in and set it. SSL can make your mail slower, your computer has to do extra work to decrypt that data. And encrypted data doesn't travel across the internet as efficiently as unencrypted data and that's why we leave the choice up to you. this was a false choice because this was an option that was hidden from most people. If you clicked into the advanced settings in G mail it said use HTTPS question mark. Nothing to indicate that this was important. It was the 13th of 13 configuration option after the vacation auto away message, after unicode settings. Most people don't know what unicode is. The user interface of G mail screamed to users this isn't important. It doesn't matter. So say this is a choice for the user, it's false. What you're doing then is allowing a system to ship in an unsecure manner and blaming the user for not seeking out the option and enable it themselves. That was Google in 2009. That meant that for the people that work in this building or at NSA, life was good. Bulk surveillance is easy in a world where everything is going over the network without any protection. For the NSA in 2009, the internet was an all you can eat buffet. We know what happens when a society is dominated by all you can eat buffets. The NSA gorged themselves. They gorged themselves until they got sick, actually until one person got sick and blew the whistle. Now it's time to put the NSA on a diet. Sorry for the analogies but they make sense. We need to starve the NSA of the data they've come to depend on. That is because of people like Ed Snowden that we now have an understanding of what is taking place and how they're collecting information which means we have an understanding of what we can do to stop them. In the last year there's been a number of disclosures about bulk surveillance targeting internet communications. And these it's fair to say, set the internet on fire. The first slide that galvanized the tech community is this slide that says the NSA is monitoring the links between Google's data centers-- Google believed -- after 2010 Google turned on SSL. Google believed they needed to encrypt the links between the user and the servers. google thought that the privately slime cables that they were renting from companies like level 3 could never be tapped so even though they had data centers in other countries they didn't feel they needed to protect the links. Google is wrong. The NSA and their GCHU partner tunneled into the private network and got information that wouldn't have left the internet otherwise. The Washington Post revealed that the NSA has been monitoring the address books of many popular communication services, Yahoo, Google, Facebook. The NSA is interested in instant messenger lists. They show communications and patterns and who you're interested in talking to. On this slide the thing that is the most interesting and damning for the tech companies is the news that Yahoo users are being targeted by the NSA in the order of magnitude and more time than Gmail or Facebook. Why were Yahoo users having their address books collected an order of magnitude more? Because they weren't using SSL. The fact that Yahoo is using it now is directly as a result of the Snowden. We've seen the tech companies beef up security. Companies embracing SSL. weve seen them tightening their choice of encryption algorithm. The adoption of perfect forward secrecy of HST browser headers. making sure that you always go back to the secure version of the website. you never go to port 80 We've seen instant message platforms all migrate to user, to server encrypted links. We just saw yesterday, Yahoo announced they -- by 2015 will be offering encrypted e-mail to all their users. encrypted end to end email, Not by default but they're offering it. We're at a point where there is this movement. There is a movement to encrypt all the things. And it's working. We're seeing Yahoo, Google, Facebook, twitter and Microsoft, we're seeing the technical teams within these companies finally have the power within the organization to get what they want. For sure their security engineers within Google and Yahoo who for years wanted this stuff. I'm sure that the people in the paranoid team at Yahoo were embarrassed by the fact that the website wasn't SSL enabled. At the end of the day they don't choose the resources they're given and it's difficult when you're a company thats not doing well, losing users to justify the expense, both in human resources and equipments to make that kind of shift, change. What pressured Yahoo and got the powers that be to allocate those resources was to hire CISO like Aleck Stamos was major negative publicity. Front page stories in newspapers around the world showing that Yahoo was successfully targeted by these intelligence agencies. The stories in the newspapers help. Naming and shaming also helped in a big way. Earlier this year Google released data on websites that do and do not use encryption for e-mail. We can all visit our bank and e-mail service and look for the lock icon in the URL. You can see whether the website is encrypting the data. It's much more difficult to see whether the e-mail that you're sending is going over encrypted links the whole way. And earlier this year as recently as January of this year the answer may have been 25 or 30 percent of servers on the internet were encrypting. Google started releasing this data a couple months ago and it's really, really useful, because it's allowed us to name and shame. And the fact is there isn't a performance reason not to have encryption, server to server encryption. No reason at all. It's because no one ever did it. For the last few months I've been calling up the general counsels, the chief privacy officers, the chief security officers of the companies and one by one explaining why they need to do this. And having this data online has made it easy. I have now something in URL form that I can include in an e-mail and say why are you not doing this. why you have an F letter score Over the past few months we got Comcast and apple and Microsoft and many, many companies are slowly doing this. It makes a big difference. To be clear start CLS is opportunistic encryption and not resistant to active attacks. but if the name of the game is protecting us against bulk surveillance this is moving us in the right direction. So naming and shaming is one technique. Another one that I know a lot of people in the tech community think is stupid is gamification this idea of badges. And it's stupid but it works. That is why every app built badges into their system. We've seen two really, really useful and successful examples of gamification that thrive the adoption of encryption. The first is SSL labs. You can go to the website and type in any other website's name or URL and they will run a bunch of tests and tell you how good the SSL configuration is. And more importantly they give you a letter score. And it's for things like configuration options and algorithm and and perfect forward secrecy and resistance to the beast attack and other things. In the last 6 months to a year we've seen server operations changing their configurations because they want an A plus score. This makes surveillance more expensive. Perfect forward secrecy reduces the risk to users when ket are compromised or stolen or compelled from a company. A couple Norwegian guys started start TLS info. You can type in any domain name and it gives you a letter score for the SMTP encryption options. The NSA still has not got the best score in the world. And this also has been really, really useful in getting people to turn this stuff on, So we've had naming and shaming. We've had gameification. And another method that worked well is bribery. For the last six months I've been offering whiskey to administrators of servers to turn on SSL for their websites. It started as a joke but it's actually working. So the first major site to go SSL by default was tech dirt citing the whiskey offer. I need to send them three bottles of whiskey to say thank you. I cant released the secret yet but I got an e-mail from an engineer at a very, very large website yesterday telling me they will be going SSL by default and specifically asking for whiskey. They didn't even say please. This stuff works. Then of course yesterday Google announced a huge move in which they're going to give a boost in the page rank scores to sites turning on SSL by default. This is a really big deal. When you think of all the scummy SEO people )search engine optimization and the tricks that they will pull to get their websites one step higher on the Google result, this is going to be huge in terms of getting websites to do the right thing. The combination of the carrot and the stick is definitely moving in the right direction. So that's where we've been in the last couple years. How we've gotten companies to turn on SSL. How we've gotten companies to flip these options. In many cases our messaging can use some work. Not just around SSL but in interacting with policymakers in D.C. Some of the messaging that we use in this community is good for us but scary to the outside world. its so scary that it hurts us down the road when were litigating cases I'm going to give you a few examples of that. It's really sort of funny in some case bus it's funny in a private way. We need to clean up our act and use a little bit of marketing. To spin some of these technologies in a better sounding way. I'm sure in the last year many of you have seen companies touting their NSA proof technology. Of course this stuff isn't NSA proof. And there's a debate to be had about the merit of this and whether if this is false sense of security. For the purpose of this discussion, the problem with saying that your stuff is NSA proof is that it strikes fear into the hearts of policymakers. Members of congress, they don't want NSA proof technology. They think the NSA is doing their job. They think that police wiretaps are a good thing. We can quibble about how often they're used. But members of congress mostly support some kind of surveillance. If we tout surveillance proof, FBI proof, what they see in their minds are technologies that that help the bad guys and that's not good. This is Mushadin sectrets a largely ridiculed terrorist encryption app online. No one uses this thing but every couple years there is a story about how there is a different version of Al-Qaida encryption app. This is really, really scary to people in D.C. and policymakers and they really believe this stuff exists and that it's used and it's preventing the FBI from capturing the next terrorist. When we use language similar to this stuff. Maybe you don't have an AK-47 as the logo for your app, but when we use this it looks really, really scary to the people in power and to the courts. This is an excerpt for a case from the ninth circuit called the cotterman case where a guy brought a laptop back from Mexico. this is a foot note in a majority decision From the court saying we do not suggest that password protecting an entire device as opposed to files within a device can be a factor supporting a reasonable suspicion determination. This is a really long winded way of saying that the ninth circuit thinks that disc encryption is okay but per file or per folder encryption is suspicious. thats laughable but These are judges that don't know a lot about technology. They think that the encryption that comes built into your operating system, the whole disk encryption is reasonable. its a legitimate Cyber security technology that protects data breaches, but they think if individual people choose particular folders to encrypt, that is a sign of something suspicion. so that were just up against We're up against judges that think a file or a folder level encryption is inherently suspect. When you're app or the program you're using is a wiretap proof technology, that judge freaks out. You look like a bad guy just for using it in the first place. The message I'm going to give you is we need our technologies to be as boring as possible. We don't want to be exciting. I know it's great to have a DEFCON person on stage with flashing lights and talk about how you hacked this and that but that is really scary to judges. The security and encryption technology that we're pushing now that we want the public to use, they need to be non-threatening. Not to the user but the court. The members of congress, the FBI. They need to be as boring and standard as possible. Another example. There was a supreme court oral argument about O'Reilly about whether police need a warrant to look at your phone. You are arrested for something, can they look at your phone and download all the data from the phone. It's an exchange between the lawyers and the chief judge of the court. I'll show you the excerpt in a minute. Chief justice john Roberts thinks that someone with a single cell phone is okay but someone with two cell phones is a drug dealer. Roberts himself says that people with two cell phones are suspect. And when a lawyer says no, he says what's your authority for having people with many cell phone on their person. He never met someone with two cell phones even though the majority of the lawyers in the court have multiple cell phones on them. In D.C. where I live, people are forced to use blackberries and they also have a second phone because they want a useful smart phone. Having two cell phones in our world makes you a bad guy. How do we push back against the court when two cell phones are suspicious. If you have an app on one of your cell phones that lets you make wiretap proof calls, you're a really, really bad guy. and i dont want you to be a really really bad guy, And when we end up litigating one of those cases I don't want our defendant to be a really, really bad guy. with two phones and an NSA proof calling out. which means don't talk about the NSA. The services that you're building, the cool apps and protocols you're designing need to be boring and not involve nations, state and intelligence. You can do what the Tor project does and talk about your threat model and global pass adversaries. but don't talk about the NSA. It doesn't help anyone. This is a really good example of this point. This woman is Pamela hash boar Jones. A Federal trade and commision- commissioner. She left in 2010. And she was the first U.S. government official to ever give a public speech in which she mentioned the word SSL. She worked at the FTC, an agency that I worked at. And in March 2010 she gave a speech and asked all cloud computing companies to turn on HTTPS. she said; Today i challenge all of the companies that are not yet using SSL by default that includes E-mail providers, et cetera, step up and protect consumers. dont do it some other time, make your website secure by default. This is really powerful language. Really good language from a senior presidentially appointed U.S. official. She is calling for something we all want. We all want widespread encryption. She doesn't talk about the NSA. Like wise this guy. Chuck Shumer. super super law enforcement friendly senator from new york, He loves law and order and surveillance. This is him in 2011. Providers of major websites have a responsibility to protect individuals who use their sites and submit private information. It's my hope that the private sites put in secure HTTPS sites. again we have a pro Law enforcement senator calling for companies to deploy technology that make network based wire taps more difficult. How do you get a senator to do that. how do you get a senator to call for a technology that makes life more difficult for the police? Bribes are one way. Whiskey is another way. Or you don't talk about the police. We didn't talk about the NSA. These folks didn't talk about the NSA. Instead they were talking about hackers. Sorry, that's what hackers look like to people in Washington, D.C. You guys have your ninja masks in your bags. They were both responding to a tool called firesheep released by Eric butler. This was a easy to use graphical interface. a Firefox plug in that captured authentication cookies by going over the wire and let you log into the accounts of other people that were sharing the the same wifi network as you. This was the wall of sheathe in browser plug in form. What made it a big deal, this was a plug in that anyone could download and in fact, several million of people downloaded it, then it made it to The New York Times. There was a story about the firesheep and then a month or two later Chuck Shumer is sending letters to Yahoo and Amazon and Twitter telling them to hurry up and turn on its SSL. The way we get this encryption stuff deployed is by making it palatable for the people in power, making it it seem like an anticrime technology. Antitheft technology. In 2009, I and 37 other researchers signed a letter to Eric Schmidt back then the CEO of Google in which we called on Google to turn on SSL for Gmail. in this letter we said we urge you to follow the lead of the financial industry and enable SSL by default. This is because of the huge threat posed by identity threat. We didn't mention the NSA. We didn't mention the police. This was criminals at Starbucks. Of course Bruce Schneider know about the bulk government surveillance. But you don't have to advertise it. Right. Make it easy for the people in power to do the right thing and take advantage of the boogie men that we have which are identity thieves. The other thing to note is that in the United States we don't have a privacy commissioner. In Canada and European countries they have privacy commissioners that are responsible for all things privacy. We don't have that in the United States. We have the federal trade commissions that regulates accepted business practices and goes after tech companies for lying about privacy. The FCC that goes after obscenity like Howard stern on the air. We don't have a national privacy regulator. If we want the two regulators that we have to do thing that we care about we have to portray in language that they understand. We have to make it seem like it's consistent with their mission. so the federal trtade commission cares about identity theft, The FCC cares about the radio and phone networks. If we want them on our side and want them to pressure companies and give speeches, we need to help them to do so and that means not talking about the NSA. We can talk about it in this community. But when talking to the outsider we can't use that language that isn't scary t them That means we need to talk about cyber. I know that there are many people that think the word cyber is stupid. It's ridiculous that people in suits talk about cyber as something serious. When you hear the word cyber you think of something that looks like this. It's really difficult to find an image that captures cyber sex that is funny but not too offensive. It took me hours to find this. Most of us when we think of cyber we think of awkward conversations in AOL chat rooms with people who may or may not be the actual age they tell us they are. And we don't think of something that is serious. We don't think of cyber-security. For many of us when we hear the word cyber we think of age, sex, and location. But the fact is that for the people that matter, the people in power, right, for them ... For them cyber is real. Cyber is the real deal for people in D.C. Cyber-security is the only part of the defense department budget that is going up. The only part of the DHS budget that is going up. One of the things legislation actually moves in D.C. so by us ridiculing cyber, we're not part of the debate around cyber. We're absent. We let them set the agenda around cyber because we think it's silly because they're using the wrong words. This is the director of national intelligence. Famously lied before congress. And so James Clapper in March of 2014 said when it comes to the distinct threat areas, in their annual threat assessment, this year leads to cyber and it's hard to overemphasize its significance here we have the top national security official in the United States telling the senate that this cyber thing is the biggest threat this country faces. Bigger than terrorism. These cyber threats put all sectors of our country at risk. Again, with this language, the average non-tech savvy senator or member of congress, they're thinking oh my goodness this cyber-security stuff is huge. It's a huge threat and we have to do something and we're not present. We're not present in that debate. And we really should be. So you may think, okay, well the reason these people are talking about cyber-security all the time is because of money. And that's entirely true. Right. They're a defense contractor that are advertising zero days, on the sub way in D.C. You the ex-director of NSA that leaves and offering himself at a million dollars a month to clients. Cyber security business is big business in D.C. But so what. What matters is that people care. What matters is if you're talk about cyber-security you get in the meeting. People listen to you. People think it's important. Cyber-security is important in the eyes of policymakers which means we should be using the language of cyber-security for all of the stuff we're doing. Every technology that we're building we should be pitching as cyber-security. And the reason for this, cyber security is moving through D.C. whether we like it or not. Let me explain how this works. You have these ex-generals and ex-government officials who go on and work for defense contractors and every week they go to a meeting with congressional staff to pitch how big of a threat cyber-security is. On one side of the table you have this ex-general or ex-senior government official that doesn't really understand technology. And on the other side of the table you have a member of congress that doesn't understand technology or a 24 year-old staffer with a science and technology degree that doesn't understand technology. They never get into the detail of saying this particular technology is a threat to our cyber-security. If the meeting is a success, the best possible outcome is the member of congress leaves with a feeling that China is attacking us. Cyber-security is a massive threat. We need to dedicate more money to this and maybe the company that had the meeting, their technology might be useful. That is it. We had one person that lives in D.C. who is laughing. This is true. This is actually how it works. What that means is this is happening every day, every week, these meetings are taking place in hearing rooms and committees, every week someone is coming in ask saying that cyber-security is a huge thing. Now if we try to stand there and say, in fact this cyber stuff is bull shit, they're going to ignore us. There are too many people saying that cyber-security is a problem. We cannot push back against that. But what we can do is say that these other things are a cyber-security problem and the technology that we're building protects us all from cyber threats. We're not telling them the briefings they got from ex-generals are wrong, we're just saying there are better things to do to keep us safe. The average member of congress doesn't understand technology. This is Ted Stevens for all of you that don't recognize the face. He became famous for this internet as a series of tubes thing. My guess is the way that meeting went down is you had some tech person come into a briefing and he was describing the internet as a bunch of pipes. And pipes is like a fairly accurate description. We talk about pipes in the tech community. And Stevens is sitting there drawing on his note pad and that one word sticks in his head and then he gets to the senate and gives a speech and pipes become tubes and he becomes a laughing stock. He retained from that meeting that the internet involved tubes. All we need to do is convince them that our technologies protect cyber-security. We don't have to go very far because they don't go too far into the woods. Traditionally those of us who work in this space, the lawyers, the law, the advocates, those of us that work in this space, we have a real uphill battle. We go into a meeting with a member of congress and say you shouldn't pass legislation requiring backdoors in encryption technology. You shouldn't pass laws requiring companies to retain records of everything their customers do. you shouldn't pass laws prohibiting what people do with the technologies they buy, We find some people who are sympathetic to this message but there are a lot of people in congress whose first priority is public safety. And in their eyes there is a trade off between public safety and privacy. There are some members who really care about privacy and civil liberties and are willing to go gun hoe down the privacy and civil liberties path path. But there are many others care a little bit more about public safety. They're worried the next time there is an attack, their vote no on a bill will come back to haunt them. that they will loose election No one wants to vote no on a piece of legislation that will make it more difficult for the police to catch the bad guy. That's the reality of the world. We can only convince so many members of congress to put privacy and civil liberties ahead of national security. What if it's a security versus security debate? What if instead of trading off privacy against national security, there are different security threats that the members have to weigh. What if adding back doors to communications network opens those networks up to compromise by hackers. It's a security versus security debate. What if you retain large amounts of data that data becomes an attractive targets for criminals. oh suddenly data retention is a more complex issue. By embracing the language of cyber security we can shift this from a debate where we lose to a debate where we might win. Many of you may have heard of the four horseman of the information apocalypses. There are trump cards in political debates. Pedophiles and drug dealers, it's tough to push legislation when members or pro-law enforcement people say this bill or this technology helps terrorists hide their stuff. And traditionally those of us on the public interest side of the table have always had a bad set of cards. We've had the bad facts. All the case law, all the fourths in the case law is drug dealers and pedophiles. Everyone's fourth amendment rights come from really bad cases with really bad attacks. Traditionally the four horse men were not good for our side. But now there is a now horseman. And he looks like this. His name is Wang Dong. This is a real FBI wanted poster. this is one of the chinese military officials who was indicted by the U.S. government. Foreign nation hackers are a huge threat and a threat that policymakers take seriously. Chinese cyber hackers are just as big of a boogie man as pedophiles and drug dealers. Now members of congress have to way decisions that pit things that may help the police against things that help the nation state attackers. Suddenly we don't get steam rolled. What that means is we need to reframe the debate around the technology that we all care about. For far too long Tor has been a technology to help citizens protect their privacy online where the internet is paralleled and censored, that is not the case. TOR is not about journalists or dissidents. It's a cyber security technology. Silent circle or signal, two voice apps that encrypt your communication that goes over the carrier's network. These are not wiretap proof telephone communication acts. These are cyber security technology that protects you from nation state adversaries using MC-cachers. see how this works? Tech secure is not an anti-surveillance technology. It's a pro-cyber-security technology to keep you safe where the phone companies have not employed strong security technologies. We need to embrace this language that everything we're doing must be cyber. Even if you think it's silly, just keep saying it. Cyber, cyber, cyber. It sounds silly, but in a few years we're going to have a face that the ACLU will almost certainly join in some way where the government will say that encryption, a particular form of encryption is a devil's technology used by drug dealers and bad guys. Now we can see that -- then we'll be able to say that most of the web is using HTTPS and government agencies are using PGP, well be able to say that govt agencies are using TOR to protect our data from bad guys. When that happens the courts will not be able to demonize these technologies. suddenlu sing TOR or voice encryption or full disk or folder encryption will not be suspicious and the way we get there is through cyber. its a war lets fight this cyber war... Thank you very much. "This text is being provided in a rough draft format.  Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings."
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Channel: DEFCONConference
Views: 8,598
Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5
Keywords: DEFCON Video Series, DEFCON Conference, Defcon, DEF CON, DC22, DEF CON 22, DEFCON 22, Hackers, Hacking, Computer Security, Conference Recordings, Software (Industry), Speeches
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Length: 41min 32sec (2492 seconds)
Published: Tue Jan 06 2015
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