- cypherpunks@lists.ogf.org

NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide
by coderman 05 Dec '13

05 Dec '13

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphon… """ NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, Wednesday, December 4, 12:18 PM The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractorEdward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool. (Video: How the NSA uses cellphone tracking to find and ‘develop’ targets) The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result. One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data is often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year. In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programsthat have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them. (Graphic: How the NSA is tracking people right now) U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets. Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said “there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.” The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect. Still, location data, especially when aggregated over time, is widely regarded among privacy advocates as uniquely sensitive. Sophisticated mathematical techniques enable NSA analysts to map cellphone owners’ relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths. Cellphones broadcast their locations even when they are not being used to place a call or send a text. (Video: Reporter Ashkan Soltani explains NSA collection of cellphone data) CO-TRAVELER and related tools require the methodical collection and storage of location data on what amounts to a planetary scale. The government is tracking people from afar into confidential business meetings or personal visits to medical facilities, hotel rooms, private homes and other traditionally protected spaces. “One of the key components of location data, and why it’s so sensitive, is that the laws of physics don’t let you keep it private,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. People who value their privacy can encrypt their e-mails and disguise their online identities, but “the only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our modern communication system and live in a cave.” The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes, by one account, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress’s print collection. The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data. In the ensuing year and a half, the NSA has been transitioning to a processing system that provided it with greater capacity. The possibility that the intelligence community has been collecting location data, particularly of Americans, has long concerned privacy advocates and some lawmakers. Three Democratic senators — Ron Wyden (Ore.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Barbara Mikulski (Md.) — have introduced an amendment to the 2014 defense spending bill that would require U.S. intelligence agencies to say whether they have ever collected or made plans to collect location data for “a large number of United States persons with no known connection to suspicious activity.” NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said. Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data “may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now.” The number of Americans whose locations are tracked as part of the NSA’s collection of data overseas is impossible to determine from the Snowden documents alone, and senior intelligence officials declined to offer an estimate. “It’s awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers,” one intelligence official said in a telephone interview. An NSA spokeswoman who took part in the call cut in to say the agency has no way to calculate such a figure. An intelligence lawyer, speaking with his agency’s permission, said location data are obtained by methods “tuned to be looking outside the United States,” a formulation he repeated three times. When U.S. cellphone data are collected, he said, the data are not covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures. According to top-secret briefing slides, the NSA pulls in location data around the world from 10 major “sigads,” or signals intelligence activity designators. A sigad known as STORMBREW, for example, relies on two unnamed corporate partners described only as ARTIFICE and WOLFPOINT. According to an NSA site inventory, the companies administer the NSA’s “physical systems,” or interception equipment, and “NSA asks nicely for tasking/updates.” STORMBREW collects data from 27 telephone links known as OPC/DPC pairs, which refer to originating and destination points and which typically transfer traffic from one provider’s internal network to another’s. That data include cell tower identifiers, which can be used to locate a phone’s location. The agency’s access to carriers’ networks appears to be vast. “Many shared databases, such as those used for roaming, are available in their complete form to any carrier who requires access to any part of it,” said Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. “This ‘flat’ trust model means that a surprisingly large number of entities have access to data about customers that they never actually do business with, and an intelligence agency — hostile or friendly — can get ‘one stop shopping’ to an expansive range of subscriber data just by compromising a few carriers.” Some documents in the Snowden archive suggest that acquisition of U.S. location data is routine enough to be cited as an example in training materials. In an October 2012 white paper on analytic techniques, for example, the NSA’s counterterrorism analysis unit cites two U.S.-based carriers to illustrate the challenge of correlating the travels of phone users on different mobile networks. Asked about that, a U.S. intelligence official said the example was poorly chosen and did not represent the program’s foreign focus. The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile. Like encryption and anonymity tools online, which are used by dissidents, journalists and terrorists alike, security-minded behavior — using disposable cellphones and switching them on only long enough to make brief calls — marks a user for special scrutiny. CO-TRAVELER takes note, for example, when a new telephone connects to a cell tower soon after another nearby device is used for the last time. Side-by-side security efforts — when nearby devices power off and on together over time — “assist in determining whether co-travelers are associated … through behaviorally relevant relationships,” according to the 24-page white paper, which was developed by the NSA in partnership with the National Geospatial Agency, the Australian Signals Directorate and private contractors. A central feature of each of these tools is that they do not rely on knowing a particular target in advance, or even suspecting one. They operate on the full universe of data in the NSA’s FASCIA repository, which stores trillions of metadata records, of which a large but unknown fraction include locations. The most basic analytic tools map the date, time, and location of cellphones to look for patterns or significant moments of overlap. Other tools compute speed and trajectory for large numbers of mobile devices, overlaying the electronic data on transportation maps to compute the likely travel time and determine which devices might have intersected. To solve the problem of undetectable surveillance against CIA officers stationed overseas, one contractor designed an analytic model that would carefully record the case officer’s path and look for other mobile devices in steady proximity. “Results have not been validated by operational analysts,” the report said. Julie Tate contributed to this report. Soltani is an independent security researcher and consultant. """

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Snowden Civil War
by John Young 05 Dec '13

05 Dec '13

Snowden Civil War: http://cryptome.org/2013/12/snowden-civil-war.htm

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Fwd: [cryptography] A new approach to steganography
by coderman 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Bram Cohen <bram(a)bittorrent.com> Date: Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 11:27 AM Subject: [cryptography] A new approach to steganography I came up with a new approach to steganography. There's an implementation and writeup of it here - https://github.com/bramcohen/DissidentX

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Willis Ware Dies
by John Young 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

Willis Ware dies, early computer engineer: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/technology/willis-ware-who-helped-build-b… Seminal computer security paper 1979: http://cryptome.org/sccs.htm

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trends in cybersecurity
by dan＠geer.org 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

Given last month as keynote to the National Reconnaissance Office's planning conference. Trends in Cyber Security http://geer.tinho.net/geer.nro.6xi13.txt Respectfully, --dan

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ntru-crypto - Open Source NTRU Public Key Cryptography Algorithm and Reference Code
by coderman 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

https://github.com/NTRUOpenSourceProject/ntru-crypto """ Security Innovation, Inc., the owner of the NTRU public key cryptography system, made the intellectual property and a sample implementation available under the Gnu Public License (GPL) in 2013 with the goal of enabling more widespread adoption of this superior cryptographic technology. The system is also available for commercial use under the terms of the Security Innovation Commercial License. NTRU represents a significant improvement in the Public Key cryptography world—it’s faster, stronger and smaller than virtually any other system in use and it’s quantum computer resistant, making it the best choice for current projects with lifetimes that extend into the post quantum computer age.... NTRU is a lattice-based public key cryptosystem from Security Innovation and the leading alternative to RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) due to its higher performance and resistance to attacks from quantum computers. NTRU was developed in 1996 as a visionary solution to cyber security challenges for the twenty-first century. NTRU is based on a mathematical problem called the “Approximate close lattice vector problem” and comprises three algorithms: NTRUEncrypt, NTRUSign, and PASSSign. It has been reviewed and published in scholarly journals and presented at Crypto, Eurocrypt, and RSA, and has been adopted in IEEE and X9 standards Because it is based on different math from RSA and ECC, the NTRU algorithm has different cryptographic properties. At comparable cryptographic strength, NTRU performs costly private key operations much faster than RSA or ECC. In addition, NTRU's comparative performance increases with the level of security required. As key sizes increase by a factor of n, RSA's operations/second decrease by about n3 whereas NTRU's decrease at n2. """

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Re: bitcoin as a global medium of exchange (was Re: Interesting take on Sanjuro's Assassination Market)
by Bill Stewart 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

At 05:43 PM 11/25/2013, David Vorick wrote: >Bitcoin has a lot of problems. >Andy, the problem isn't the denomination, the problem is that >Satioshi has 5% of all the currency, and the Winklevoss twins have >another 0.5%. If bitcoin becomes worth 100 trillion dollars, they've >got a solid 500 billion for being nobody and doing nothing. That's a >problem to me. Satoshi gave us the technology and got people to start using it. If he gets fabulously wealthy by owning 5% of it, I'm not jealous (well, ok, a bit jealous, but I'm not going to contend that he shouldn't have it just because of jealously.) The Winklevossen are just speculators; I don't particularly like using a currency whose value is mostly from speculation, but experimentation is a critical part of rolling out something like a new type of currency, so whatever. At least they pumped some cash into the system early on. And that guy in Norway who was an early experimenter, then kind of forgot about his bitcoins until he suddenly noticed they were worth $800K? Cool, good for him! It wouldn't be surprising if the first people to do GPU-based mining also got a large pile of bitcoins compared to the CPU-based miners. >I'm working on one right now. It's not built but the idea is to use >proof-of-contribution instead of proof-of-work, where contribution >is disk storage contributed to a distributed network. I think "proof of useful contribution" is a much better thing than "proof of wasted electricity"; good luck getting it off the ground. I'd recommend reading all of Zooko's Tahoe-LAFS work for getting some ideas about privacy and reliability issues, both of which are harder than they look. The other catch is that storage costs do keep decreasing, and storage in a cloud is always a lot slower than local storage, so you'll have to think hard about business models. One of the cool things Bitcoin did was created a way to have the proof-of-work turn into currency without needing a banker in the middle; that means that users and miners don't have to worry (much) about the creator absconding with the value or being shut down, and there's built-in protection against hyperinflation, unlike some of the dotcom silly currencies like Beenz and Flooz that appeared and vanished along with the dogfood-on-line dotcoms. It's been interesting to watch Bitcoin's value surviving after the loss of the Silk Road site (which got around the "Nothing To Buy With It" hurdle that helped kill the original Chaumian Digicash.)

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NSA: The Game
by Peter Gutmann 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

For those of you familiar with the game Werewolf (also known as Mafia), here's an updated version, NSA. Peter. -- Snip -- NSA === Peter Gutmann, 11 November 2013. Adapted from a Werewolf writeup found on Zarfhome. http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/nsa_werewolf.txt NSA is a simple game for a largeish group of people, ten or more is best. It requires no equipment apart from some playing cards, or even just bits of paper. You can play it by simply sitting in a circle, but sitting around a table works better (there's room for drinks and snacks). Setting Up Make up a set of cards, one for each player, with a role on each one: Two NSA agents (Werewolves in the original) One Edward Snowden (Seer in the original) One EFF member (Healer in the original) All the rest are Internet users (Villagers in the original) The cards can be anything from fancy custom ones with the NSA logo and other graphics representing the players' roles, through to a convenient pack of Dora the Explorer cards with N, S, and E scrawled on a few of them. In addition to the players there's a moderator who runs things. The moderator shuffles the cards and hands them out, face down. Each player should look at their card without revealing it to anyone else. If there are more than about 15 players then the number of NSA agents, Snowdens, and EFF members can be increased. Two players are secretly NSA agents. They are trying to apply extraordinary rendition to all of the Internet users. Everyone else is an innocent Internet user, but one of the Internet users, Snowden, secretly has inside access to classified information and can detect the presence of NSA agents. In addition another Internet user is an EFF member and can protect one player per turn from the NSA's extraordinary rendition. The Game: Night and Day The game begins with each player introducing themselves. The standard formula for this is "Hi, my name is <insert name here> and I'm an innocent Internet user". This can be embellished as required with additional comments. Once everyone has been introduced, the game proceeds in alternating night and day phases, beginning with night. At night, the moderator tells all of the players "Night has fallen, close your eyes". The moderator then says "NSA, open your eyes". The two NSA agents do so, and look around to recognize each other. The moderator should also note who the NSA agents are. The moderator says "NSA agents, pick someone to render". The two NSA agents silently agree on one Internet user to subject to extraordinary rendition. It's important that they remain silent while doing this, pointing at the victim works best. When the NSA have agreed on a victim and the moderator understands who they picked, the moderator says "NSA agents, close your eyes". The moderator says "Snowden, open your eyes. Snowden, pick someone to check". Snowden opens his eyes and points at another player (as for the NSA agents, this has to be silent). The moderator signs thumbs-up (or some similar yes- gesture) if Snowden pointed at an NSA agent, and shakes their head (or some similar no-gesture) if the Snowden pointed at an innocent Internet user. The moderator then says "Snowden, close your eyes". Finally, the moderator says "EFF member, open your eyes. EFF member, pick someone to protect". The EFF member opens his/her eyes and, as with the others, points at another player. The moderator then says "EFF member, close your eyes". In the initial rounds its best if the EFF member protects themselves. If and when Snowden identifies himself, the EFF member should protect Snowden in order to prevent him from being subject to extraordinary rendition by the NSA. The moderator says "Everybody open your eyes. It's daytime, and <insert victim name> has been subject to extraordinary rendition". The named person is immediately out of the game, and typically leaves the table or circle so that only active players remain. He or she can't say anything involving the game beyond this point, but would typically sit at the periphery and watch the game continue. Now it's daytime. All of the remaining players decide who to lynch as a suspected NSA agent. Anyone can say anything they want. NSA agents can claim to be Edward Snowden and "unmask" NSA agents who are actually innocent Internet users. Players can privately whisper things to other players (for example claiming to be Snowden, or the EFF member), or secretly pass notes. Any excuse to lynch someone is valid, for example because they have a beard, because they're Australian, or because they took the last potato chip. The real Edward Snowden should remain silent until they've identified at least one NSA agent, since they'll be an immediate target for extraordinary rendition if they reveal themselves too early. Similarly, the EFF member shouldn't reveal their identity unless absolutely necessary, since they need to protect Snowden without being themselves rendered by the NSA. Once a majority of players vote for a particular player to die (the player can be allowed to defend themselves, for example by claiming that "we, too, are Internet users", leading to further votes), the moderator says "<insert-name> has been lynched as a suspected NSA agent and is now dead". The player leaves the game in the same way as those subject to extraordinary rendition. If the players take too long to decide, the moderator can hint that night is about to fall, and if they still dither, night will fall without anyone being lynched. At this point the cycle repeats. Everyone closes their eyes, the NSA agent(s) select another person to subject to extraordinary rendition, Snowden (if alive) learns another player's identity, and the EFF member (if alive) protects another player. The sun rises, one player is rendered (unless protected by the EFF member), and the remaining players discuss another lynching. Repeat until one side wins. Winning The Internet users win if they kill all of the NSA agents. The NSA agents win if they render enough Internet users that the numbers of Internet users and NSA agents are even. In other words they win if the NSA agents constitute a large enough voting bloc that they can't be lynched any more. At that point the NSA can unmask and openly subject the remaining Internet users to extraordinary rendition. Notes When everyone closes their eyes at night, it's best for people to make some sort of noise, typically tapping the table. This will cover up any accidental sounds that are made by the NSA agents, Snowden, the EFF member, or the moderator. Once a player is lynched or rendered, there are two options on what to do with their cards, show or no-show. The show option is easiest, particularly for the initial games. With this option the player reveals their card, so that the other players know what sort of person has been eliminated. The no-show option is harder but a lot more fun. With this option the player doesn't reveal their card, so that the other players have no idea who's still left in the game.

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Re: NSA: The Game
by Pokokohua 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

Would it work swapping renditions for drone strikes as an option? > For those of you familiar with the game Werewolf (also known as Mafia), > here's an updated version, NSA. > Peter.

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DEF CON cell network attacks
by coderman 02 Dec '13

02 Dec '13

On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Dan Staples <danstaples(a)disman.tl> wrote: > I would be interested to see the details of the exploits you > witnessed/were subject to (especially since I was at DC20). of course; the complete details will be slow to arrive, not least because detailed description requires a demonstration in a reproduction test setup, rather than reporting of actual traffic. :/ that said, useful aspects i'll certainly provide on whim or request. the defining characteristics of the two types of attacks: DC19 with DRT: - "high power on-site", less descriminant attacks. target by and limited to location. - MitM for system, application, and protocol level attacks. Evilgrade, MasterKey vulns, etc. mostly known and a few 0day escalated attacks. - favorite attack: "Google Voice Search" always-on eavesdropper payload; Speex voice from all audible participants. DC20 with Alexander's toys: - "in the towers", highly targeted to specific devices, active over wide metro area. - baseband exploit vector for device key retrieval, memory and storage forensics, exfiltration. - PDoS attacks (bricked secondary devices used as fall back once identified by call graph; ~20 hours) - favorite attack: baseband pwn in airplane mode, with ex-filtration over custom channel. DC21: no appearance (observed). speculation ongoing... > How exactly > did you determine how the exploits occurred, and who was responsible for > them? reversing attacker capabilities, toolkits, TTPs, humanpower/hours, a much longer tangent. but this assertion is based on correlation of the observed power, capacity, and protocols in specific bands implemented by the attacker with the capabilities of the DRT system. multiple locations, terabytes of captured spectrum, patience and tuning... as for who was operating it - unknown beyond the usual suspects, which is a small set due to the restricted distribution of both the hardware platform and the exploit kit atop it :) --- i'll send more details once available. the details and distribution to be part of a separate FOIPA effort for US citizen security enthusiasts that might be of interest to those following this thread. best regards,

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