This is an interesting story of a serious vulnerability in a Huawei driver that Microsoft found. The vulnerability is similar in style to the NSA’s DOUBLEPULSAR that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers — believed to be the Russian government — and it’s obvious that this attack copied that technique. What is less clear is … Read More “NSA-Inspired Vulnerability Found in Huawei Laptops” »
Category: backdoors
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The Japanese government is going to run penetration tests against all the IoT devices in their country, in an effort to (1) figure out what’s insecure, and (2) help consumers secure them: The survey is scheduled to kick off next month, when authorities plan to test the password security of over 200 million IoT devices, … Read More “Japanese Government Will Hack Citizens’ IoT Devices” »
Last week, I evaluated the security of a recent GCHQ backdoor proposal for communications systems. Furthering the debate, Nate Cardozo and Seth Schoen of EFF explain how this sort of backdoor can be detected: In fact, we think when the ghost feature is active — silently inserting a secret eavesdropping member into an otherwise end-to-end … Read More “Hacking the GCHQ Backdoor” »
The so-called Crypto Wars have been going on for 25 years now. Basically, the FBI — and some of their peer agencies in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere — argue that the pervasive use of civilian encryption is hampering their ability to solve crimes and that they need the tech companies to make their systems … Read More “Evaluating the GCHQ Exceptional Access Proposal” »
Impressive police work: In a daring move that placed his life in danger, the I.T. consultant eventually gave the F.B.I. his system’s secret encryption keys in 2011 after he had moved the network’s servers from Canada to the Netherlands during what he told the cartel’s leaders was a routine upgrade. A Dutch article says that … Read More “El Chapo’s Encryption Defeated by Turning His IT Consultant” »
Last week, Australia passed a law giving the government the ability to demand backdoors in computers and communications systems. Details are still to be defined, but it’s really bad. Note: Many people e-mailed me to ask why I haven’t blogged this yet. One, I was busy with other things. And two, there’s nothing I can … Read More “New Australian Backdoor Law” »
Back in October, Bloomberg reported that China has managed to install backdoors into server equipment that ended up in networks belonging to — among others — Apple and Amazon. Pretty much everybody has denied it (including the US DHS and the UK NCSC). Bloomberg has stood by its story — and is still standing by … Read More “That Bloomberg Supply-Chain-Hack Story” »
Earlier this month, I wrote about a statement by the Five Eyes countries about encryption and back doors. (Short summary: they like them.) One of the weird things about the statement is that it was clearly written from a law-enforcement perspective, though we normally think of the Five Eyes as a consortium of intelligence agencies. … Read More “More on the Five Eyes Statement on Encryption and Backdoors” »
Some of us — myself included — have proposed lawful government hacking as an alternative to backdoors. A new report from the Center of Internet and Society looks at the security risks of allowing government hacking. They include: Disincentive for vulnerability disclosure Cultivation of a market for surveillance tools Attackers co-opt hacking tools over which … Read More “Security Risks of Government Hacking” »
The Five Eyes — the intelligence consortium of the rich English-speaking countries (the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand) — have issued a “Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption” where they claim their needs for surveillance outweigh everyone’s needs for security and privacy. …the increasing use and sophistication of certain … Read More “Five-Eyes Intelligence Services Choose Surveillance Over Security” »