US
and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet
- NSA
and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and
medical records
- $250m-a-year
US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses
into products
- Security
experts say programs 'undermine the fabric of the internet.
5
September, 2013
US
and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of
the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people
to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions
and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former
contractor Edward Snowden.
The
files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart
GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies
have given consumers to reassure them that their communications,
online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to
criminals or governments.
The
agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in
their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the
biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet
traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the
internet".
Those
methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of
international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to
break encryption with "brute force", and – the most
closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology
companies and internet service providers themselves.
Through
these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret
vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into
commercial encryption software.
The
files, from both the NSA and GCHQ, were obtained by the Guardian, and
the details are being published today in partnership with the New
York Times and ProPublica. They reveal:
• A
10-year NSA program against encryption technologies made a
breakthrough in 2010 which made "vast amounts" of data
collected through internet cable taps newly "exploitable".
• The
NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works
with technology companies to "covertly influence" their
product designs.
• The
secrecy of their capabilities against encryption is closely guarded,
with analysts warned: "Do not ask about or speculate on sources
or methods."
• The
NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of
admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of
cyberspace".
• A
GCHQ team has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on
the "big four" service providers, named as Hotmail, Google,
Yahoo and Facebook.
NSA
diagram
This
network diagram, from a GCHQ pilot program, shows how the agency
proposed a system to identify encrypted traffic from its internet
cable-tapping programs and decrypt what it could in near-real time.
Photograph: Guardian
The
agencies insist that the ability to defeat encryption is vital to
their core missions of counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence
gathering.
But
security experts accused them of attacking the internet itself and
the privacy of all users. "Cryptography forms the basis for
trust online," said Bruce Schneier, an encryption specialist and
fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "By
deliberately undermining online security in a short-sighted effort to
eavesdrop, the NSA is undermining the very fabric of the internet."
Classified briefings between the agencies celebrate their success at
"defeating network security and privacy".
"For
the past decade, NSA has lead [sic] an aggressive, multi-pronged
effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies,"
stated a 2010 GCHQ document. "Vast amounts of encrypted internet
data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."
An
internal agency memo noted that among British analysts shown a
presentation on the NSA's progress: "Those not already briefed
were gobsmacked!"
The
breakthrough, which was not described in detail in the documents,
meant the intelligence agencies were able to monitor "large
amounts" of data flowing through the world's fibre-optic cables
and break its encryption, despite assurances from internet company
executives that this data was beyond the reach of government.
The
key component of the NSA's battle against encryption, its
collaboration with technology companies, is detailed in the US
intelligence community's top-secret 2013 budget request under the
heading "Sigint [signals intelligence] enabling".
NSA
Bullrun 1
Classified
briefings between the NSA and GCHQ celebrate their success at
'defeating network security and privacy'. Photograph: Guardian
Funding
for the program – $254.9m for this year – dwarfs that of the
Prism program, which operates at a cost of $20m a year, according to
previous NSA documents. Since 2011, the total spending on Sigint
enabling has topped $800m. The program "actively engages US and
foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage
their commercial products' designs", the document states. None
of the companies involved in such partnerships are named; these
details are guarded by still higher levels of classification.
Among
other things, the program is designed to "insert vulnerabilities
into commercial encryption systems". These would be known to the
NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are
tellingly referred to in the document as "adversaries".
"These
design changes make the systems in question exploitable through
Sigint collection … with foreknowledge of the modification. To the
consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security
remains intact."
The
document sets out in clear terms the program's broad aims, including
making commercial encryption software "more tractable" to
NSA attacks by "shaping" the worldwide marketplace and
continuing efforts to break into the encryption used by the next
generation of 4G phones.
Among
the specific accomplishments for 2013, the NSA expects the program to
obtain access to "data flowing through a hub for a major
communications provider" and to a "major internet
peer-to-peer voice and text communications system".
Technology
companies maintain that they work with the intelligence agencies only
when legally compelled to do so. The Guardian has previously reported
that Microsoft co-operated with the NSA to circumvent encryption on
the Outlook.com email and chat services. The company insisted that it
was obliged to comply with "existing or future lawful demands"
when designing its products.
The
documents show that the agency has already achieved another of the
goals laid out in the budget request: to influence the international
standards upon which encryption systems rely.
Independent
security experts have long suspected that the NSA has been
introducing weaknesses into security standards, a fact confirmed for
the first time by another secret document. It shows the agency worked
covertly to get its own version of a draft security standard issued
by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved for
worldwide use in 2006.
"Eventually,
NSA became the sole editor," the document states.
The
NSA's codeword for its decryption program, Bullrun, is taken from a
major battle of the American civil war. Its British counterpart,
Edgehill, is named after the first major engagement of the English
civil war, more than 200 years earlier.
A
classification guide for NSA employees and contractors on Bullrun
outlines in broad terms its goals.
"Project
Bullrun deals with NSA's abilities to defeat the encryption used in
specific network communication technologies. Bullrun involves
multiple sources, all of which are extremely sensitive." The
document reveals that the agency has capabilities against widely used
online protocols, such as HTTPS, voice-over-IP and Secure Sockets
Layer (SSL), used to protect online shopping and banking.
The
document also shows that the NSA's Commercial Solutions Center,
ostensibly the body through which technology companies can have their
security products assessed and presented to prospective government
buyers, has another, more clandestine role.
It
is used by the NSA to "to leverage sensitive, co-operative
relationships with specific industry partners" to insert
vulnerabilities into security products. Operatives were warned that
this information must be kept top secret "at a minimum".
A
more general NSA classification guide reveals more detail on the
agency's deep partnerships with industry, and its ability to modify
products. It cautions analysts that two facts must remain top secret:
that NSA makes modifications to commercial encryption software and
devices "to make them exploitable", and that NSA "obtains
cryptographic details of commercial cryptographic information
security systems through industry relationships".
The
agencies have not yet cracked all encryption technologies, however,
the documents suggest. Snowden appeared to confirm this during a live
Q&A with Guardian readers in June. "Encryption works.
Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things
that you can rely on," he said before warning that NSA can
frequently find ways around it as a result of weak security on the
computers at either end of the communication.
The
documents are scattered with warnings over the importance of
maintaining absolute secrecy around decryption capabilities.
NSA
Bullrun 2
A
slide showing that the secrecy of the agencies' capabilities against
encryption is closely guarded. Photograph: Guardian
Strict
guidelines were laid down at the GCHQ complex in Cheltenham,
Gloucestershire, on how to discuss projects relating to decryption.
Analysts were instructed: "Do not ask about or speculate on
sources or methods underpinning Bullrun." This informaton was so
closely guarded, according to one document, that even those with
access to aspects of the program were warned: "There will be no
'need to know'."
The
agencies were supposed to be "selective in which contractors are
given exposure to this information", but it was ultimately seen
by Snowden, one of 850,000 people in the US with top-secret
clearance.A 2009 GCHQ document spells out the significant potential
consequences of any leaks, including "damage to industry
relationships".
"Loss
of confidence in our ability to adhere to confidentiality agreements
would lead to loss of access to proprietary information that can save
time when developing new capability," intelligence workers were
told. Somewhat less important to GCHQ was the public's trust which
was marked as a moderate risk, the document stated.
"Some
exploitable products are used by the general public; some exploitable
weaknesses are well known eg possibility of recovering poorly chosen
passwords," it said. "Knowledge that GCHQ exploits these
products and the scale of our capability would raise public awareness
generating unwelcome publicity for us and our political masters."
The
decryption effort is particularly important to GCHQ. Its strategic
advantage from its Tempora program – direct taps on transatlantic
fibre-optic cables of major telecommunications corporations – was
in danger of eroding as more and more big internet companies
encrypted their traffic, responding to customer demands for
guaranteed privacy.
Without
attention, the 2010 GCHQ document warned, the UK's "Sigint
utility will degrade as information flows changes, new applications
are developed (and deployed) at pace and widespread encryption
becomes more commonplace." Documents show that Edgehill's
initial aim was to decode the encrypted traffic certified by three
major (unnamed) internet companies and 30 types of Virtual Private
Network (VPN) – used by businesses to provide secure remote access
to their systems. By 2015, GCHQ hoped to have cracked the codes used
by 15 major internet companies, and 300 VPNs.
Another
program, codenamed Cheesy Name, was aimed at singling out encryption
keys, known as 'certificates', that might be vulnerable to being
cracked by GCHQ supercomputers.
Analysts
on the Edgehill project were working on ways into the networks of
major webmail providers as part of the decryption project. A
quarterly update from 2012 notes the project's team "continue to
work on understanding" the big four communication providers,
named in the document as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, adding
"work has predominantly been focused this quarter on Google due
to new access opportunities being developed".
To
help secure an insider advantage, GCHQ also established a Humint
Operations Team (HOT). Humint, short for "human intelligence"
refers to information gleaned directly from sources or undercover
agents.
This
GCHQ team was, according to an internal document, "responsible
for identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global
telecommunications industry."
"This
enables GCHQ to tackle some of its most challenging targets,"
the report said. The efforts made by the NSA and GCHQ against
encryption technologies may have negative consequences for all
internet users, experts warn.
"Backdoors
are fundamentally in conflict with good security," said
Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy
analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Backdoors expose
all users of a backdoored system, not just intelligence agency
targets, to heightened risk of data compromise." This is because
the insertion of backdoors in a software product, particularly those
that can be used to obtain unencrypted user communications or data,
significantly increases the difficulty of designing a secure
product."
This
was a view echoed in a recent paper by Stephanie Pell, a former
prosecutor at the US Department of Justice and non-resident fellow at
the Center for Internet and Security at Stanford Law School.
"[An]
encrypted communications system with a lawful interception back door
is far more likely to result in the catastrophic loss of
communications confidentiality than a system that never has access to
the unencrypted communications of its users," she states.
Intelligence
officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to
publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to
switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be
harder to collect or read.
The
three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to
publish the story because of the value of a public debate about
government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting
the privacy of internet users in the US and worldwide.
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