How it started: How it’s going:
This is probably old enough that it doesn’t ring a lot of bells for people, so here: blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/12/19/the…
I was trying to be really low-key on this one, so let me make it really blunt. There is every reason to believe the NSA tried to subvert commercial cryptography in the 2000s, and now one of the architects of that work runs applied crypto at Amazon.
It’s funny how nonchalant we’ve gotten about all of this. A year after the Snowden leaks if you’d told me we’d be fine with having people involved with Dual EC running the crypto groups at major tech firms, my mouth would have dropped open. Now I’m worried I’m being too mean.
If my boss was involved in that work, nothing they later recommended would make it to production without a million reviews. I hope that’s happening at Amazon. I mean that in the nicest and least alarmist way possible.
Also, remember this slide? Wasn’t Dual EC — but nice to know the tech companies have definitely learned their lesson.
Oh gosh I’d forgotten that “Extended Random” was recently in the news. Senator Wyden asked about it in this letter. wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…

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More from @matthew_d_green

29 Jan
I couldn’t tweet a better description than the headline for this piece: After SolarWinds breach, lawmakers ask NSA for help in cracking Juniper cold case. cyberscoop.com/nsa-juniper-ba…
For those who haven’t heard this story, the context here is back in 2015 hackers broke into the source code repository of Juniper’s NetScreen firewalls and introduced serious vulnerabilities. 1/
Everyone has heard of the SolarWinds supply chain attack, but almost nobody outside our little community remembers Juniper. We don’t even know who the ultimate victim was. And there’s a reason for that. 2/
Read 12 tweets
12 Jan
If you were planning on joining Signal and didn’t want it to look too shifty, this is the week.
Not gonna lie, when my neighbors showed up on Signal a year ago I just assumed they were spies.
Read 6 tweets
23 Dec 20
My students @maxzks and Tushar Jois spent most of the summer going through every piece of public documentation, forensics report, and legal document we could find to figure out how police were “breaking phone encryption”. 1/
This was prompted by a claim from someone knowledgeable, who claimed that forensics companies no longer had the ability to break the Apple Secure Enclave Processor, which would make it very hard to crack the password of a locked, recent iPhone. 2/
We wrote an enormous report about what we found, which we’ll release after the holidays. The TL;DR is kind of depressing:

Authorities don’t need to break phone encryption in most cases, because modern phone encryption sort of sucks. 3/
Read 26 tweets
20 Dec 20
Stories like this remind me that people in the Infosec community routinely make and sell exploits to these nations. citizenlab.ca/2020/12/the-gr…
I’m honestly curious how conscientious security researchers justify selling these tools, knowing how likely it is that they’ll be used for applications like this one.
One of the interesting things about this story is how difficult it must be to instrument iOS devices to catch these 0-click exploits in action. Partly because Apple makes it difficult. Image
Read 7 tweets
9 Nov 20
So the resolution explicitly calls for gaining “targeted access to encrypted data”, but we’re going to say that’s not a “backdoor in encryption”. Because we say things.
Sorry, @TechCrunch. The resolution may or may not be serious, but it’s not ambiguous. You either gain access to encrypted data or you don’t. techcrunch.com/2020/11/09/wha…
The problem with encryption backdoors isn’t solved by “proportionality” or having great laws that ensure the tech is only used in a targeted manner.

The problem with encryption backdoors is that to use them in a targeted way, you first need to create an encryption backdoor.
Read 12 tweets
28 Oct 20
Not to pick on @SwiftOnSecurity here, but since Juniper and Dual EC are in the news, I think it’s worth revisiting the evidence that someone deliberately inserted Dual EC as a backdoor.
For the full argument, see this excellent and readable summary my co-authors wrote: m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018…
But short summary: Juniper included two random number generators in their NetScreen devices. One was documented. The other was undocumented. The undocumented one was Dual EC. 1/
Read 10 tweets

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