A Redaction Re-Visited: NSA Targeted “The Two Leading” Encryption Chips
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..and no, I don't give a fuck about anyone's Greenwald-bashing. AFAICT he's doing it EXACTLY right. Want Dox dumps? Talk to the Anonymous children. The ones with more than a 3rd grade vocabulary MIGHT be able to formulate a coherent sentence on paper.
Also see this thread at a reddit IAMA that greenwald held regarding the topic. A number of engineering types [scroll down... 'bardfinn'] were speculating based on Greenwald's discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1nisdy/were_glenn_greenwald_and_janin...
[...] On September 5, 2013, The Guardian <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security>, the /New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?_r=0>// /and/ProPublica <http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption> /jointly reported — based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden — that the National Security Agency had compromised some of the encryption that is most commonly used to secure internet transactions. The /NYT /explained/ /that NSA “has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the emails, web searches, internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world.” One 2010 memo described that “for the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies.” In support of the reporting, all three papers published redacted portions of documents from the NSA along with its British counterpart, GCHQ. Prior to publication of the story, the NSA vehemently argued that any reporting of any kind on this program would jeopardize national security by alerting terrorists to the fact that encryption products had been successfully compromised. After the stories were published, U.S. officials aggressively attacked <http://www.reuters.com/article/net-us-usa-security-snowden-intelligence-idUSBRE9850RU20130906> the newspapers for endangering national security and helping terrorists with these revelations. All three newspapers reporting this story rejected those arguments prior to publication and decided to report the encryption-cracking successes. Then-/NYT/ Executive Editor Jill Abramson described <http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/decision-to-publish-against-government-request-was-not-a-particularly-anguished-one/> the decision to publish as “not a particularly anguished one” in light of the public interest in knowing about this program, and /ProPublica/ editors published a lengthy explanation <http://www.propublica.org/article/why-we-published-the-decryption-story> along with the story justifying their decision. All three outlets, while reporting the anti-encryption efforts, redacted portions of the documents they published or described. One redaction in particular, found in the /NYT /documents <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html>, from the FY 2013 “black budget,” proved to be especially controversial among tech and security experts, as they believed that the specific identity of compromised encryption standards was being concealed by the redaction. None of the documents in the Snowden archive identify all or even most of the encryption standards that had been targeted, and there was a concern that if an attempt were made to identify one or two of them, it could mislead the public into believing that the others were safe. There also seemed to be a concern among some editors that any attempt to identify specific encryption standards would enable terrorists to know which ones to avoid. One redaction in particular, from the /NYT/, was designed to strike this balance and was the one that became most controversial: The issue of this specific redaction was raised <https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/464044144906600448> again <https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/464015111913369600> by security researchers last month <https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/678573907947966464> in the wake of news <https://forums.juniper.net/t5/Security-Incident-Response/Important-Announcement-about-ScreenOS/ba-p/285554> of a backdoor found on Juniper systems, followed by /The Intercept/’s reporting <https://theintercept.com/2015/12/23/juniper-firewalls-successfully-targeted-by-nsa-and-gchq/> that the NSA and GCHQ had targeted Juniper. In light of that news, we examined the documents referenced by those 2013 articles with particular attention to that controversial redaction, and decided that it was warranted to un-redact that passage. It reads as follows: <https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/01/bull.png> The reference to “the two leading encryption chips” provides some hints, but no definitive proof, as to which ones were successfully targeted. Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins, declined to speculate on which companies this might reference. But he said that “the damage has already been done. From what I’ve heard, many foreign purchasers have already begun to look at all U.S.-manufactured encryption technology with a much more skeptical eye as a result of what the NSA has done. That’s too bad, because I suspect only a minority of products have been compromised this way.” NSA requested until 5 p.m. today to respond but then failed to do so. (/Update/: The NSA subsequently emailed to say: “It would be accurate to state that NSA declined to comment.”) [...] https://theintercept.com/2016/01/04/a-redaction-re-visited-nsa-targeted-the-... -- RR "You might want to ask an expert about that - I just fiddled around with mine until it worked..."
For those too lazy to look it up here's some speculation from Greenwald's IAMA October 31 2013. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1nisdy/were_glenn_greenwald_and_janin... Again, plain text and html: While I do not know the name redacted in that report, the "VPN and Web encryption devices" mentioned are most likely hardware SSL acceleration appliances <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_acceleration>[1] , and due to the sensitive nature of the backdoor being discussed, are probably in chips fabricated by a US-based silicon designer using a US-located silicon fabrication plant. The reason for that is twofold; first, you don't want a foreign power discovering your backdoor in a chip, and second, you don't want a foreign power inserting their own backdoor. The vendors <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL_acceleration#Vendors>[2] list in Wikipedia lists the following vendors of SSL appliances: * Barracuda Networks * Array Networks * CAI Networks * Cavium Networks (fabless semiconductor designer) * Cisco Systems * Citrix Systems * Cotendo * Coyote point systems * Crescendo Networks * Exinda * F5 Networks * Foundry Networks * Forum Systems * Freescale Semiconductor (fabless and fab-owning) * Hifn * IBM (fab-owning) * Interface Masters Technologies * jetNEXUS * Juniper Networks * Nortel Networks * Radware * Riverbed Technology * Strangeloop Networks * Sun Microsystems Of those, the two names that stand out most are IBM (which is no stranger to crippling encryption upon the demands of the NSA, with fabrication plants throughout the world and the United States, but which isn't significantly given to florid chip descriptors) and Freescale Semiconductors - it is itself a large semiconductor fabricator, focused on semiconductor fabrication, with foundries in Chandler, AZ and Oak Hill, TX. One not mentioned in that list is Broadcom, a semiconductor manufacturer that is /fabless/, that is - it doesn't own any fabrication capability, itself. It does, however, design a very large percentage of communications chips used in the industry. Not finding a Broadcom chip somewhere in a device is notable. The redacted space is roughly twelve all-caps letters or sixteen mixed-case letters in that font. If we could have someone identify exactly which font was used, then we could experiment with chip names from SSL acceleration device manifests, in that font, and see which fit into the redacted space, possibly with the manufacturer's name in front of the chip - for example, the Freescale SAHARA <http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?code=NETWORK_SECURITY_CRYPTOG>[3] appears to fit nicely - and is touted as having configurable access control to the random number generator and hashing functions on that feature sheet linked - but is just one possibility. Another is the PowerArchitecture™ from Mocana -formerly FreeScale <https://mocana.com/partnerprog/freescale/selling_freescale_sca.pdf>[4] . If I were in the position to lead a project to reverse-engineer the possible name of the chip, I would: * Find out what the top five top-selling SSL acceleration device manufacturers in the world are; * get a list of their best-selling products; * Get parts manifests for each of their popular products, possibly from an electronics tear down research organisation; * Locate and name the crypto accelerator chips; * Determine who designed and fabricated those chips. * Get the name of the font used in the report in the imgur link; * Compose the name of each of those chips in that font at that pitch; * Do a little comparing. /Edit/: OP is assuming that the report is listing /two, separate/ chips. While that is /possible/, it is equally as likely that one variety or species of chip is being named! i.e. /Intel Pentium chips/. There is also no guarantee that the redacted text lists a florid, marketing-friendly name, and may possibly be a code name internal to the US intelligence community. These and other alternatives should not be discounted.
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Rayzer