A key element of the design of lawful intercept is not to trust the company running the network. Otherwise employees of that company would become targets for organized crime influence, among what are probably a few other considerations. The network operator isn't told about intercepts, and the relatively low rate of traffic intercept, the node has to support up to 3% of traffic intercepted, at least that was the spec at the time, makes it relatively easy for that traffic to be hidden from network management tools. It's not supposed to show up in your logs or network management reporting.
Intercepts originate on LI consoles operated by law enforcement agencies. This sounds pretty good so far. Until a hacker breaks into an LI console. Now that hacker can acquire traffic with pinpoint accuracy, undetected by design.
I have always been skeptical of claims that network operators have eliminated salt typhoon from their networks. I do not believe they know when the exploit began. Nor can they tell if their networks are truly free of salt typhoon activity. There are multiple vendors of LI console software. It's a standardized interoperable protocol to set up intercepts. So there's no one neck to wring.
1. Propose bill to solve a problem which is either minor or completely misunderstood by the person proposing the bill 2. Pass bill, don't solve original "problem," creates 15 new, actual problems 3. Run on fixing all the new problems they created (and some others that don't exist) 4. Repeat
In the three or four year I worked with them, they would only let me do penetration testing of their user network, and never the segments where the developers were, and never the product itself. In speaking with their security team (one guy - shocker) during compliance initiatives, it was very clear to me that the product itself was not to be touched per the explicit direction of senior leadership.
All I can say is that if the parts of their environment they did let us touch are any indication of the state of the rest of their assets, that device was compromised a long time ago.
This leads me to two possible, non-exclusive outcomes: the links to China are tenuous, and the attribution is flimsy (e.g., they accessed a machine at 9 am Beijing time!); or the report implicates the system itself as unauditable by design, which was bound to happen given the design of the intercept tools.
if the specific vectors of the breach aren't disclosed, the rest of the critical infrastructure ecosystem is basically flying blind. it feels like we're trading collective security for corporate reputational damage control.
There is no reason to hide it from the general public.
SSL crackers to MITM all ISP user traffic
Where's "the government [... grandstanding] about privacy and security"? It's getting blocked by the companies, not the government.
>She said Mandiant refused to provide the requested network security assessments, apparently at the direction of AT&T and Verizon.
The problem is that telecoms are very large, very complex environments, often with poor security controls. Investing in better controls is hard, time-consuming and expensive, and many telecoms are reluctant to do it. That's not great great since telcos are prime targets for nation state hackers as Salt Typhoon shows.
Hacking the lawful intercept systems is very brazen, but even if the hackers didn't don't go as far, and "only" gained control of normal telco stuff like call routing, numbering, billing, etc. it still would have been incredibly dangerous.
This really buries the lede. Telecoms are reluctant to do it because 'doing' it isn't aligned with their priorities.
Why would a telecom risk bankruptcy by investing heavily into a system that their competitors aren't?
If you want a back-door to exist (questionable) then the government either needs to have strong regulatory compliance where poor implementations receive a heavy fine such that telecoms who don't invest into a secure implementation get fined in excess of the investment cost or the government needs to fund the implementation itself.
> “The Chinese government's espionage operation deeply penetrated networks of at least nine U.S. telecom companies, including AT&T and Verizon,” said Sen. Cantwell. “They exploited the wiretapping system that our law enforcement agencies rely on under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act -- known as CALEA. These systems became an open door for Chinese intelligence. Salt Typhoon allowed the Chinese operation to track millions of Americans’ locations in real time, record phone calls at will and read our text messages.”
A US senator is using it for political grandstanding. She is an ineffective twit with no power and no principles, no right under law to receive what she demanded, and she made sure to run to the press with it "see! look, I'm a principled, powerful senator holding those evil corporations feet to the fire!"
The problem is that the vulnerability exploited by salt typhoon is a systemic flaw implemented at the demand of Cantwell and other of our legislative morons.
You cannot have an "only the good guys" backdoor. That doesn't work. People are bad, and stupid, and fallible. You can't make policy or exceptions that depend on people being good, and smart, and infallible.
She's using the inevitable consequence of a system she helped create for her own political benefit. She voted for the backdoor back in 94 against the strenuous and principled objections by people who actually know what they're talking about.
Bobblehead talking points should not serve as the basis for technical policy and governance, but here we are.
Decentralized systems don't have the same faults.
Just because you want to force a structure or paradigm doesn't absolve it of responsibility for the problem.
Hand waving the problem away because a company is bad at management or scale doesn't change anything.
I don't think there's any jurisdiction that requires public disclosure at this level of detail. It's really an extraordinary ask. How many of these reports have you seen?
Yes there is a lawful intercept system that operates inside telecoms networks, that is an issue.
The other issue is that there is no real security inside said telecoms networks. (side note, there is still fucking SS7 floating about)
Salt typhoon is not "just hijacking lawful intercept" its ability to fuck with the network in a way that is largely undetected. Sure the intercept stuff might help, but they don't actually need that. In the same way we learnt about state actors taking complete control of middle east telecoms systems, we can be fairly sure that other state actors have taken control of USA telecoms systems
Both the Executive and congress have done shit all about it, and will continue to ignore it until something happens
So what? If I store a document in a private Google doc. I know that technically a Google employee could read it if they really wanted to, but the policies, security, and culture in place make it have a 0% of happening. It's possible to design proper access systems where random people are not able to come in and utilize that access.
Assuming you're talking about CALEA, I find it hard to blame Cantwell personally given that she first joined the House in 1993, and CALEA was passed in 1994. She wasn't in much of a position to "demand" anything against the headwinds of a bipartisan bill passed in both chambers by a voice vote.
Each election period they have to take a break from eroding citizens' rights catering to lobbyists. The video clips help them pretend they were doing something other than insider trading while in the seat.
How am I confusing the two? My whole point was the same as yours - that the existence of lawful intercept is a separate issue and that the focus should be on securing telecoms.
This is only because of the design defect that "lawful intercept" requires.
Telecoms should be completely untrusted because everything is end-to-end encrypted. Compromising a telecom shouldn't allow you to do anything other than bring about a denial of service, and even that would only be effective against anyone who didn't have a redundant link with a different provider, which all actually critical infrastructure should. And a denial of service is conspicuous, as opposed to spying on required-to-be-unencrypted traffic which can continue undetected indefinitely and is a significant national security risk.
Our need to not be spied on is greater than our need to spy on ourselves and requiring designs that assume the opposite of that is a major self-imposed security vulnerability.
The convention of states project seems like it might be the only way out - there's a shot at implementing term limits, clearing up some of the money in politics issues, no risk of a runaway convention, etc, and we can bypass the people deliberately fouling up the system.
How quickly "Hacker" News forgets Snowden.
This should be trumpeted as an example of why we cannot mandate encryption backdoors in chat, unless we want everybody to have access to every encrypted message we send.
Schmidt notoriously had a backdoor, and I'd be far more shocked if executives did not have backdoor access and know all the workarounds and conditions in which they have unaccountable, admin visibility into any data they might want to access.
These are human beings, not diligent, intrepid champions of moral clarity with pristine principles.
We know it's non-zero as they have already had occasions when it has happened that Google employees used their access to stalk teenagers.
Any Eng at Google can read the entire codebase for gdrive, if there were backdoors it would become public knowledge very quickly.
A hacker in control of a telco can do as they please regardless of any backdoors or lawful intercept systems. They can just use regular network functions to route calls wherever they want.
And you say it's stronger now.
Ok, so which country or neighbor is going to be the one to hack our national encryption system with a back door the first time? The second time? The third time? Before we manage to get it right (which we never will), what damage will be done by the backdoor? Probably something like Salt Typhoon, which you also conveniently ignore as a counterfactual to your claim.
The complaints of the victim's parents kicked off an internal investigation, months later. It's not like google found this and took care of it on their own. Also, it has happened before too.
>Before we manage to get it right (which we never will)
Keep in mind that modern encryption isn't perfect either. You can just guess the key and then decrypt a message. In practice if you make the walls high enough (requiring a ton of guesses) than it can be good enough to keep things secure.