* Can governments not inspect the hardware themselves to see if there are physical backdoors?
* Could they not, as a precondition for any provider, demand to see the source code of the radios?
* If the ISPs tunnel the backbone traffic combined with more/most Internet traffic being secured anyway,
wouldn't that minimize data leaks?
* If you admit that the previous point isn't valid because of metadata concerns, doesn't that invalidate the US
national security establishment's position on metadata towards the public?
They have previously scoffed at such concerns ("It's only a phone number") but now it matters.
* Wouldn't rogue equipment exfiltrating data be rather obvious?
I’m surprised this hasn’t happened already, or isn’t more widely being done.
One thing that I didn’t see in the article is a discussion around authentication of the radio broadcast. I don’t know anything about radio encryption, but I assume that like other forms of encryption, the receiver is able to authenticate the source. This seems like something anyone would want, like TLS for radio.
I get the desire for transparency, but that should that trump the need for trusted radio transmissions?
Also, it’s interesting to see discussion of the opposite issue around encryption. Where in this case it’s the gov’t being asked to be open, as opposed to law enforcement’s desire to have backdoors in our devices.
They currently get a pass on the “trust us, everything is end-to-end encrypted” without providing open access/verifiable toolchains. They are large and high profile enough that the public can trust that there are enough experts and nerds keeping an eye on them to hold them to their promises.
Adding a data exfiltration radio has some of the same verifiability, in that you could put an antenna next to the device and verify that it does/does not send signals. However it is only a matter of time before the radio cannot be fully disabled for some reason or another (oh we just turn on the radio to get guaranteed network time as part of our Trusted Cloud Experience that we secure you with!). Once that ship sails the devices will no longer be owned by the users and cannot be trusted.
Perhaps one reason for the secrecy is that the devices are unlicensed radio emitters and are illegal to use. Imagine how delighted the FCC would be if a law enforcement agency showed up and asked to operate in radio spectrum licensed to a wireless provider with no particular coordination with anyone else.
If the devices can be classed as something intended to deliberately disrupt the operation of a licensed radio service they could be classed as jamming devices and would be illegal to manufacture or possess.
These Stingray devices cross the line between passive monitoring and active attacks on public infrastructure. I can't really see how this can end well for the parties involved.
Yeah, I guess the algorithm is secure but how it's implemented may not be. I think the NSA was involved with at least some radio manufacturers implementation, so there could be a backdoor.
If the transmission was encrypted, it would have also been illegal on the amateur bands [1]. This isn't 90s crypto-war paranoia; the concern about encryption is that if transmissions on the amateur bands are allowed to be obscured, unscrupulous individuals (say, taxi companies), could flood the amateur bands with commercial transmissions rather than pay for a share of the commercial bands. This goes against the open, public intent behind amateur bands, and takes away bandwidth from amateur users (read: the public, you and me). The FCC is looking out for us.
Radio spectrum is a finite resource. If you look at a chart [2] of US Frequency allocations, amateur radio operators have been given the right to transmit on a relatively massive fraction of the physically available spectrum. It would easily be worth billions if it were commercial. Instead, due to the quirks of history, the public has been given wondrous access to the airwaves. It's a public resource, like a park, and it's the Grand Canyon, it's Yellowstone, it's Yosemite. As hackers we have to respect it, and we have to protect it by using it responsibly. We need to get licensed, and we need to educate others so we can avoid a tragedy of the commons. Illegal transmissions are like litter. If we don't follow the rules and treat the amateur spectrum well, the FCC could plausibly decide to auction it off. It's not like there isn't pressure to do so. Demonstrating a DIY BTS is very cool, but at least have the decency to test it in a faraday cage. Don't litter in my park.
Amateur radio is fun, and it's one of the original electronics hacker activities. Get licensed, assemble a few simple electronic components, and talk to someone else (often like you), potentially thousands of miles away. All without reliance on any extant communications infrastructure. How cool is that? It's a tremendous way to learn about physics and electronics, and there are many exciting things happening with digital transmissions. It's a magical thing when you hear a foreign voice coming from your speaker, carried from a transmitter a continent away. Learn, build, and have (responsible) fun in the park!
Wow, It's amazing they couldn't fix this over the last decade. Even a simple obfuscation, anything is better than raw data that is so easily viewable and worse verifiable. I would assume there is plenty of people with experience encrypting and decrypting radio / satellite signals for the military in the US. Maybe the problem lies in it not being a software problem, but rather some horrid design that relegates it to hardware.
Either way now that this is public knowledge it needs to be fixed appropriately.
Forgive me if this seems obtuse but honestly seriously in each of our phones is an antenna, over that antenna is sent radiowaves, encoded in those radiowaves is information that must be decoded by the other side of the transmission.
Each layer of that has a specification, in that specification each side has implementations of that specification. To me, I fundamentally don't care what an individual corporation "can or can't do". I care what the spec says, because that's what the corporation can and can't do unless they have something completely 100% proprietary.
Speculation is worthless, show me the spec of what function calls enable the collection of this data, and what the structure of the message looks like over the wire.
Beyond that, on a rooted device that I have full control over, I should be able to work out the details of how that's happening and whether or not I want to fiddle with it to allow my carry around computer to do so or not.
If the implicit assumption that root access to my pocket computer makes it unable to turn off such a thing, then that's news. The rest are layers and layers of complexity as to what the defaults of the systems involved are allowed to do via permissions systems. We're either cool with those defaults, or we aren't.
So, imo. Start with the specs, if it's possible via them then it's surely happening whether or not it's "legal" to do so. My apologies if this comes across as harsh, but what else did we expect? We're fortunate enough to live in the cusp of the information age, but the first 50/100/200 years of this are bound to be messy before it either goes full dystopian forever, or enough outrage affects those defaults.
It's a cool paper and almost none of it depends on knowing much about low-level crypto vulnerabilities.
Police tactical radios are an interesting case where denial of service and traffic analysis are genuinely threatening scenarios. Most modern crypto protocols aren't built to be secure from either. So right off the bat, you have a paper saying they can shut police tactical radios off for entire metro areas.
I'm not sure how true that is of digital domain RF in general, though.
The confidentiality flaws here seem to boil down to usability; the configuration and metadata used by this system is so brittle that trivial real-world setbacks preclude encryption; these happen so often that police teams don't even notice when encryption isn't enabled.
Assuming that the radio and router are separate and only the radio firmware is locked down, is there any way that the NSA could snoop on the content? Or are you saying you want to have the right to reprogram the radio?
Interesting. Never heard this argument. I'd counter by saying WiFi bands are encrypted but commercial use hasnt swampee them. So not sure how likely the scenario is.
Nonetheless, I'd be up for discussing escrowed, authenticated encryption or key retention with random civil audits. That would be better than nothing. They could have an auditor that's nog a cop get the keys to certain transmissions to check them. Only forwarded to authorities if criminal activity is found. This would let us retain privacy quite a bit while mitigating issue you mentioned.
Do we really need control over the radio hardware? Or can we treat them as dumb pipes, and use something like Tor to shield us from whoever can track who is using a radio channel?
Really sucks but at the same time radios are only public because of how they work by design. I am surprised that encryption wasn't the default on sensitive channels like this (and ATC, which I enjoy listening to)
This is such a weird topic in the ham community. The reason this restriction exists has nothing to do with the retro-justifications used by the community.
For a long time, the US government genuinely feared that ham radio would be used for espionage. It had listening stations across the nation to monitor all communications. It flat out shut down the entire service (!) during WWII. And it came up with the idea that you have to communicate in the open, and that no form of obfuscation or encryption is permissible.
And then hams came up with this roundabout explanation that actually, it's good that you can't have privacy. No matter that it holds back a hobby that is by all usage metrics dying, and that there are many countries where encryption is allowed and doesn't lead to any terrible outcomes.
Privacy is useful in hobby uses. Maybe you want to talk to your spouse without a nosy neighbor listening. Maybe you want to periodically beacon your GPS location without the whole world knowing. There are so many cool things you can do, and there is spectrum that is... quite frankly, largely dead right now, and if you don't encourage new uses, it will be reclaimed by the government.
reply