from the there-is-no-backdoor-that-only-works-when-'good-guys'-use-it dept.
U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack
From Schneier's Blog
A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/10/china-possibly-hacking-us-lawful-access-backdoor.html
It's a weird story. The first line of the article is: "A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers." This implies that the attack wasn't against the broadband providers directly, but against one of the intermediary companies that sit between the government CALEA requests and the broadband providers.
For years, the security community has pushed back against these backdoors, pointing out that the technical capability cannot differentiate between good guys and bad guys. And here is one more example of a backdoor access mechanism being targeted by the "wrong" eavesdroppers.
Pluralistic: China Hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen Using the FBI's Backdoor (07 Oct 2024) – Pluralist
China hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen using the FBI's backdoor (permalink)
State-affiliated Chinese hackers penetrated AT&T, Verizon, Lumen and others; they entered their networks and spent months intercepting US traffic – from individuals, firms, government officials, etc – and they did it all without having to exploit any code vulnerabilities. Instead, they used the back door that the FBI requires every carrier to furnish:
In 1994, Bill Clinton signed CALEA into law. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires every US telecommunications network to be designed around facilitating access to law-enforcement wiretaps. Prior to CALEA, telecoms operators were often at pains to design their networks to resist infiltration and interception. Even if a telco didn't go that far, they were at the very least indifferent to the needs of law enforcement, and attuned instead to building efficient, robust networks.
Predictably, CALEA met stiff opposition from powerful telecoms companies as it worked its way through Congress, but the Clinton administration bought them off with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to acquire wiretap-facilitation technologies. Immediately, a new industry sprang into being; companies that promised to help the carriers hack themselves, punching back doors into their networks. The pioneers of this dirty business were overwhelmingly founded by ex-Israeli signals intelligence personnel, though they often poached senior American military and intelligence officials to serve as the face of their operations and liase with their former colleagues in law enforcement and intelligence.
Telcos weren't the only opponents of CALEA, of course. Security experts – those who weren't hoping to cash in on government pork, anyways – warned that there was no way to make a back door that was only useful to the "good guys" but would keep the "bad guys" out.
These experts were – then as now – dismissed as neurotic worriers who simultaneously failed to understand the need to facilitate mass surveillance in order to keep the nation safe, and who lacked appropriate faith in American ingenuity. If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can build a security system that selectively fails when a cop needs it to, but stands up to every crook, bully, corporate snoop and foreign government. In other words: "We have faith in you! NERD HARDER!"
NERD HARDER! has been the answer ever since CALEA – and related Clinton-era initiatives, like the failed Clipper Chip program, which would have put a spy chip in every computer, and, eventually, every phone and gadget:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
America may have invented NERD HARDER! but plenty of other countries have taken up the cause. The all-time champion is former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who, when informed that the laws of mathematics dictate that it is impossible to make an encryption scheme that only protects good secrets and not bad ones, replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia":
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-laws-of-australia-will-trump-the-laws-of-mathematics-turnbull/
CALEA forced a redesign of the foundational, physical layer of the internet. Thankfully, encryption at the protocol layer – in the programs we use – partially counters this deliberately introduced brittleness in the security of all our communications. CALEA can be used to intercept your communications, but mostly what an attacker gets is "metadata" ("so-and-so sent a message of X bytes to such and such") because the data is scrambled and they can't unscramble it, because cryptography actually works, unlike back doors. Of course, that's why governments in the EU, the US, the UK and all over the world are still trying to ban working encryption, insisting that the back doors they'll install will only let the good guys in:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/
Any back door can be exploited by your adversaries. The Chinese sponsored hacking group know as Salt Typhoon intercepted the communications of hundreds of millions of American residents, businesses, and institutions. From that position, they could do NSA-style metadata-analysis, malware injection, and interception of unencrypted traffic. And they didn't have to hack anything, because the US government insists that all networking gear ship pre-hacked so that cops can get into it.
This isn't even the first time that CALEA back doors have been exploited by a hostile foreign power as a matter of geopolitical skullduggery. In 2004-2005, Greece's telecommunications were under mass surveillance by US spy agencies who wiretapped Greek officials, all the way up to the Prime Minister, in order to mess with the Greek Olympic bid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%9305
This is a wild story in so many ways. For one thing, CALEA isn't law in Greece! You can totally sell working, secure networking gear in Greece, and in many other countries around the world where they have not passed a stupid CALEA-style law. However the US telecoms market is so fucking huge that all the manufacturers build CALEA back doors into their gear, no matter where it's destined for. So the US has effectively exported this deliberate insecurity to the whole planet – and used it to screw around with Olympic bids, the most penny-ante bullshit imaginable.
Now Chinese-sponsored hackers with cool names like "Salt Typhoon" are traipsing around inside US telecoms infrastructure, using the back doors the FBI insisted would be safe.
Related Stories
'We are deeply alarmed [the Department of Homeland Security] has not publicly disclosed when this investigation will begin,' the senators stated in a letter:
A bipartisan group of senators has urged a federal review board to immediately begin an investigation into a Chinese hacking group's attacks against the United States, according to a recent letter sent to Robert Silvers, undersecretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Led by Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), the senators wrote in a letter dated Nov. 14 that the independent Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) had announced in late October that it would initiate a review "at the appropriate time," a DHS spokesman confirmed in a statement to the Wall Street Journal, following media reports that Salt Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored threat group, had breached several U.S. telecommunications companies.
[...] The senators noted that the CSRB's announcement "is a good first step." The CSRB, established by the DHS in 2022, consists of federal officials and private-sector cybersecurity experts.
"We are deeply alarmed DHS has not publicly disclosed when this investigation will begin," the senators wrote. "While details of the attack are still being revealed, the scope of this attack is historic in nature and the hacking technique used by Salt Typhoon holds countless senior U.S. officials and millions of U.S. citizens at risk.
"With all due speed and urgency, the CSRB should begin investigating how this happened immediately."
Previously: U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack
T-Mobile's network was among the systems hacked in a damaging Chinese cyber-espionage operation that gained entry into multiple US and international telecommunications companies, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday citing people familiar with the matter:
Hackers linked to a Chinese intelligence agency were able to breach T-Mobile as part of a monthslong campaign to spy on the cellphone communications of high-value intelligence targets, the Journal added, without saying when the attack took place.
[...] It was unclear what information, if any, was taken about T-Mobile customers' calls and communications records, according to the WSJ report.
[...] On Wednesday, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US cyber watchdog agency CISA said China-linked hackers have intercepted surveillance data intended for American law enforcement agencies after breaking into an unspecified number of telecom companies.
Earlier in October, the Journal reported that Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers, including Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies and obtained information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping.
Previously: U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DrkShadow on Friday October 11, @12:33AM (11 children)
Every single time cops, legislatures, etc call for backdoors into encryption -- this is the example to put before everyone.
It. Is. Not. Possible. Here's the proof.
It's a backdoor for everyone, or it's a backdoor for no one.
(Score: 5, Informative) by driverless on Friday October 11, @04:14AM
And it's not like this is the first time this has happened, google "greek cellphone scandal" which exploited exactly the same mechanism to get in more than 15 years ago. But hey, it couldn't happen here, could it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, @05:15AM (6 children)
Showing them the proof is a wasted effort.They don't care. Your proof is like water off a duck's back. Let me paraphrase the summary:
"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in the USA is the law of the USA"
And in a way, this is true. Deep packet inspection will reveal the unauthorized use of encryption and just redirect those packets to the proper authorities who will then compel you to decrypt the message or go to jail
Every election cycle we surrender our rights when we reelect the people who write these laws or refuse to repael them
This is just the way things will be until enough people become interested in changing it. That too, is a mathematical certainty. In the meantime just relax and enjoy it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday October 11, @07:22AM (5 children)
Tell me, which candidates can we vote for who will work against authoritarianism?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Friday October 11, @09:15AM (3 children)
Surely if none of the parties/candidates match your values and goals then the right thing to do is form a new party and table candidates that do. At least that is how it is supposed to work in a democracy.
The alternative is you end up with parties that are stagnant and eventually they realise people vote for them no matter what they do. So they stop paying attention to the electorate at all and just do whatever is in their interest, at which point the country is a democracy in name only.
(Score: 1) by Opyros on Friday October 11, @06:37PM (1 child)
But then all your third party will do is draw votes away from one of the two major parties, helping the other to win (i.e., the party which is furthest from your position). At least here in the U.S.A. with our first-past-the-post method of deciding a winner, the two-party system is a near inevitability [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday October 12, @12:36AM
That is a cost of change. It is not that much different here in systems with a proportional system. Case in point you have incumbent parties that effectively collude to work together against the electorate, so that no matter who you vote for nothing changes and nobody pays attention to the electorate needs.
So you decide to form a new party, this party will draw votes away from other parties, meaning it will unbalance things, shake the tree a bit. The incumbent parties may realise they have to adapt before they lose more voters and may start listening to the electorate again. If they don't then each election they will bleed more and more voters to the new parties until eventually the old incumbents are no more.
Generally the first start of a party is the hardest because it will have no voice. At least in Europe most countries require at least a 5% threshold of votes to even be considered a party worth reporting on. So until then you are effectively in the shadows and without much of a voice in society (unless your party is bankrolled by some rich and influential media moguls), once you break the 5% you start being put on lists of political parties (And the state can actually provide you with assistant funds to help you grow further). Once you get enough votes to get a seat in parliament (or the USA equivalent), you then have a voice at the table and can call out the ruling parties for their behaviour. If done right you can end up as "kingmaker [wikipedia.org]", allowing you to negotiate the adoption of your policies with an incumbent party in return for lending support to their rule.
The problem is that this cycle can take a long time (4 or more election cycles), and it is slowest at the beginning, making it an exercise in frustration and expense to get started. The first past the post system makes this even harder than usual because proportional representation gives disproportionate representation to smaller parties compared to their voting size, meaning they can take the ruling parties to task much earlier.
If course, all this entails long term effort and vision, with the acceptance that while you draw votes away from other parties things will get worse before they get better (which paradoxically, can result in speeding up the alternative parties growth).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Saturday October 12, @04:05AM
The last time we had someone really working against authoritarianism was Paul Wellstone. That didn't end well for him.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, @06:37PM
It is up to the voters to seek them out and petition to put them on the ballot. Political parties are unnecessary, and are destructive anyway. It would really help a lot if they weren't given automatic placement on the ballot. Everybody needs to be put on equal footing. This would be much better than the present day method of waiting for mass media to tell you to vote for the lizard with the biggest advertising budget. Whatever changes we are looking for have to come from us. There is nobody else.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, @08:45AM (1 child)
Lotus Notes had a backdoor. It wasn't a backdoor for everyone.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday October 11, @09:15AM
Do you mean that as far as we are aware nobody exploited the backdoor? It might not be the same thing.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by PiMuNu on Friday October 11, @11:28AM
TFA is just talking about comms equipment. Breaking "encryption" means breaking the security of *every single financial transaction in the world*.
(Score: 3, Touché) by mrpg on Friday October 11, @01:31AM
OMG.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Barenflimski on Friday October 11, @03:00AM (1 child)
We need to see how they got in.
These things should be so firewalled, so patched, so monitored with active protections this makes this a serious failure.
How long were they in? What did they look at?
I sure hope these machines were rebuilt from the ground up, along with the network gear.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, @04:51AM
They got in through government mandated back doors. Blocking them is against the law because it also would block the police, so no, we can't put up any firewalls that would actually work.
They're still in, the mandated back door is still wide open.
Anything they wanted to, they have all the time in the world. This is all still ongoing.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday October 11, @03:40AM
Like to many other authors the article's writer, or perhaps the editor, conflates targeting with successful breaches. While the systems in question here were breached, after having been targeted, there is a huge difference between the two activities. Only vulnerable systems are successfully breached when targeted. Simply the act of targeting a system does not in itself guarantee a breach, except in the Windows mindset.
Now, the CALEA-mandated back doors gave the CCP a way in, and that should be the point of the article. Misusing terminology, specifically saying target instead of breach, muddies the water and makes discussions and solutions more difficult.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, @04:39AM (7 children)
We should expect the same from Harris.
Tell me again, why should we vote for democrats when they don't respect our rights any better than the republicans?
All the denials notwithstanding, we do this to ourselves. Complaining about the law is silly and nonproductive. Instead, let's use our power to change it
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, @06:48PM (6 children)
Offtopic
Once again touching on the root of the problem has been deemed "offtopic" by political partisans. We are only allowed to talk about China! China! China!, not that we ourselves, with our vote, hold the door wide open for them.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday October 11, @06:57PM (5 children)
I think what people are trying to tell you is that you are turning, or at least attempting to turn, every discussion into a political issue. Politics affects everything that we do, and there is plenty of political discussion on this site. The site does not need it in every story.
If you want to discuss how voting should change in the USA then write about it in your journal and let everybody who is interested discuss it there.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, @07:33PM (4 children)
That's because where I bring it up, it is a political issue (really a psychological issue expressed through politics). The reminder needs to be hammered in that our votes created and sustains this problem, and that is the only thing that can fix it. Everything else is just too superficial and masturbatory in nature, all repeated ad nauseum word for word over the millennia and still goes unresolved, which is apparently by design. Attempting to break the ant mill is considered taboo. Tagging it offtopic is simple denial of the truth, and nobody wants to hear that.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday October 11, @07:39PM (3 children)
Yes, we know!..
You keep telling us. You've raised the same point in several different stories. We've read it. An each time it is being moderated by different people as Off-Topic. If you want to discuss it further I suggest that you put it in your journal.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, @07:56PM (2 children)
That fact that China entered through a politically mandated back door makes the issue political, as are the offtopic mods, they are pure politics. But whatever, it merely indicates that nobody is interested in resolving anything, they just want to have their two minute hate fest. Carry on...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12, @03:47AM (1 child)
Actually, it was a legally mandated back door. That makes it a legal issue. Stop trying to drag Harris into things she doesn't even understand.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12, @04:35AM
Distinction without a difference. Thing is we all know what needs to be done to change the law in order to permit secure communications