A Redaction Re-Visited: NSA Targeted “The Two Leading” Encryption Chips

Thu Jan 7 19:33:57 PST 2016

Plain text and html...
> ..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_janine_gibson_of_the/

[...]

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-two-leading-encryption-chips/

-- 
RR

"You might want to ask an expert about that - I just fiddled around
with mine until it worked..."

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