NSA operation ORCHESTRA: Annual Status Report on HackerTube: recommended by 9 Hacker News commenters across 5 separate months, 2014–2019.
talk · intermediate · evergreen
Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk is a hypothetical account of how an intelligence agency such as the NSA would sabotage open source software, standards and online discussion. It covers Skype's history, OpenSSL and psyops against standards.
HN returned to it repeatedly, especially after Heartbleed, as an eye-opening argument about subverting open source and standards.
“The entire talk is an eye opener.”
20 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Check out phk's fosdem talk[0]. I've linked to the the part where he talks about openSSL, but I'd suggest watching the whole thing. I'm now starting to believe the talk wasn't a joke at all... [0] ▶ this video
in “"OpenSSL has exploit mitigation countermeasures to make sure it's exploitable"” · View on HN
There's a talk that was given in Belgium / Brussels at FOSDEM2014 two months ago or so by Poul-Henning Kamp (FreeBSD) regarding the NSA and how he'd do it if he had to create holes in software: ▶ this video He's talking specifically about OpenSSL quite a lot (basically saying it's too complex to ever be secure and probably received many "security patches" from NSA employees). The entire talk is an eye opener. He explains how NSA shills are reading reddit / HN and poisoning communities / standards / protocols / etc. How everything is made, on purpose, needlessly complex to prevent honest developers from working on important things. He talks about shills submitting a few correct patches over the months / years, slowly gaining reputation among the community and then misusing that trust to submit (not so) subtle patches introducing security holes on purpose. He mentions a few of the "common mantra" repeated often (including here) by people who have an interest in the status quo. He explains why SSL/TLS is broken and says that the "SEC" part of "DNSSEC" is not going to be that secure ; ) I think that the problem is much worse than most people think and that Poul-Henning Kamp is closer to the truth than the ones constantly repeating "bug happens" as if nothing malicious was ever going on.
in “"OpenSSL has exploit mitigation countermeasures to make sure it's exploitable"” · View on HN
I think open-source software is great as well, but assuming these kind of bugs are found because you can inspect the code is very wishful thinking that doesn't always hold up. This specific example required a Google department to find it. Who would have found it if Google got restrained by the NSA?. Other notable examples include openSSL. On top of that, here is a great talk about how easy it would be to infiltrate open source projects: ▶ this video
in “Signal: Incoming call can be connected without user interaction” · View on HN
>I have this notion that surrounding a subject with basket case conspiracy theories would be a good way to get people not to take it seriously :) Indeed, it would. A lot of clever people have discussed the issue of disinfo & FUD, you might wish to: * Watch this talk from FOSDEM '14 by Poul-Henning Kamp [Contextually, one important tidbit to keep in mind while watching it: At the time phk gave the talk, the heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL wasn't yet known!]: ▶ this video * and, perhaps, read these two blog posts, but tread carefully with those two, as, unlike the above video, the below edges MOST dangerously close to basket case conspiracy theory territory - arguably, it doesn't get there, but I can definitely say that if one slips while looking into the below, one'll immediately end up in basket case territory: [link] [link] However, having said this & pointed out all of the above, before going down any of the above lanes, keep something else in mind: 1. Take a look at when some of these links got first published online . Multi-decade gap vs. original date of publication. Something unfortunately still the norm for a lot of old(er) scientific/academic literature. 2. Most of Frey's original papers from the 60s are still behind a HARD paywall. Again, unfortunately still the norm for a lot of old(er) scientific/academic literature. 3. The whole classified Radar tech research aspect of it (This whole avenue of research got started out when radar techs in the 60s started complaining
in “Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers” · View on HN
This talk was an interesting thought experiment by PhK of FreeBSD on how if he were tasked by some agency to sabotage open source projects and standards how he would go about doing it ▶ this video A talk by Robert Harper at OPLSS in 2017 is really good as well, covering the basics of programming language background [link] "concrete syntax is where computer science meets psychology.... at the moment it's all a matter of opinion"
in “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?” · View on HN
Hmmm… and ElGamal's signing scheme didn't qualify? I don't think that's a reason, or even an excuse: Schnorr actually did claim his patent read on DSA. (That obviously never went anywhere, and the US Government, in a show of force via the NSA, filed their own patent on DSA.) The NSA also really doesn't seem to have had much of a problem negotiating the licensing of patents with industry participants in the past! It is, after all, in an extraordinarily strong bargaining position: an awful lot of public money to throw around (openly, via on-the-book government contracts, and otherwise); the backing of a 'superpower' government and its negotiators; a remarkably good idea of what the position of those its bargaining with is (it is a signals intelligence agency…!); and is even able to classify patents and other nonsense like that. DSA was sceptically received at the time, and there was widespread suspicion about its complexity and critical dependency on random k. (Even just two or three predictable leading bits of k can cause disaster!) Sizes above 1024 bit were not specified for way too long, and I would consider a 1024-bit DSA key most definitely crackable by the computing resources available to the NSA (or perhaps anyone else with a budget and a chip fab on contract after-hours!) today. (Those with DSA PGP signing keys may wish to take note and replace them, I suggest, with 4096-bit RSA keys.) I think perhaps the only reason DSA got any popularity was because of the RSA patent,
in “Making sure crypto remains insecure [pdf]” · View on HN
Debian's 2006 PRNG anyone?! Maybe these are stupid dumb mistakes, but if I were NSA this is exactly how I'd implement backdoors. 2 lines of code cloned here (go to fail), 2 lines of code commented out there (Debian PRNG issue), and just like that you create huge vulnerabilities in the system. Hard to notice, and impossible to blame on anyone. Everytime they seem to be some brilliant "stupid mistakes". And as others have said, do listen to the FreeBSD developer's talk on NSA' ORCHESTRA operation (subverting open source projects): ▶ this video
in “Julian Assange: "Debian Is Owned By The NSA"” · View on HN
Also worth watching is his FOSDEM talk where he was calling for this before news of Heartbleed broke. ▶ this video
in “PHK: OpenSSL must die, for it will never get any better.” · View on HN
OpenSSL source code is a disaster. It's spaghetti that doesn't do what you think it does with horrible documentation. People submit patches from people they don't even know and then you have it: An SSL library that is flawed but everyone is using it. An spying agency and hackers dream. We don't need OpenSSL, we need another library built from scratch with very clean code and documentation. Everyone who has more interest on why OpenSSL is a catastrophe should watch operation ORCHESTRA[0]. [0] ▶ this video
in “IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, others pledge $3.6 million to fund OpenSSL” · View on HN
Speaking of OpenBSD, does anyone know what happened here and how true it is? [link] It would certainly jive with John Gilmore's story on how the NSA worked through the standard bodies to keep IPSEC easily exploitable by making the design too difficult to implement properly: [link] Their behavior around Simon & Speck and how they refused to reveal details on how exploitable they could be also seems to be similar to their previous tactics. This is why it's worrisome that Google intends to implement Speck in Android and have pushed it to the Linux kernel, too. [link] More details on how the NSA has been sabotaging open source projects here: ▶ this video
in “Retguard: An improved stack protector for OpenBSD” · View on HN
Why not mouth off on social media? Yes, it draws attention. But it also adds legitimacy to the operation if he is not an individual. If a PR firm is making edits to Wikipedia, they get heavily frowned on. If it appears that an individual is doing it, especially one with a long history of good edits, they will be defended. I don't have a particularly conspiratorial mind and I prefer coincidence until conspiracy becomes the simpler explanation. Just so it's clear we're not entering the unfundable fantasy realm, PR firms can easily afford a competitive salary for a Wikipedia editor just from one or two clients. As can think-tanks. I can see how I'd set up and scale up such an operation. I'd keep the one editor to one account for reasons above. I'd probably have them be more like a newspaper editor -- they keep a consistent style across the edits. I'd offload the real work to researchers who dig up sources and to write the bits they want inserted and removed. Look at the first edits by this account: they're on Jazz musicians and politics, and the political stuff isn't too biased. Eventually the cover of Jazz edits decreases. Maybe he started out as a Wikipedia editor and enjoyed writing so got picked up by one of the many many think-tanks that pay journalism money for advancing what will make their sponsors money. Maybe he's an internet sock-puppet. Snowden revealed that the UK has a unit that engages in such activities. [0] This very site has not been immune from individuals who
in “A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign” · View on HN
The "don't roll your own crypto" mantra was created by the NSA to make people afraid to develop and deploy cryptography. See here: ▶ this video
in “MEGAChat now includes end-to-end encryption” · View on HN
> self signed certificate unless it's explicitly verified is worth less. Of course it's worth less ; the point is that it's not worthless , and has greater value than plaintext. > if the attacker can perform a MITM attack Then you communication is still protected from other attackers. > What i do not want to see is people thinking that if we just spam SSL certs and stick them on everything That's exactly the thing that needs to happen. PHK was right when he pointed dout that it would be trivial for Apache to simply generate a self-signed cert on first use if no other cert exists, removing a lot of the plaintext on the the internet. > it will some how help us "some how"? The point was it provides very good protection against passive analytics (aka "eavesdropping", "spying"). > this is the classical definition of security theater. Nonsense, nobody has ever claimed self-signed certificates were "safe", we only said they were better than plaintext . Why would you accept self-signed certificates as any kind of authentication? > self signed certs trains people to just click accept sigh That dialog may be the biggest reason we're still using plaintext. I needs to die yesterday, for the very reason you say: it gives people bad habits. That kind of scary popup needs to be reserved for invalid certificates, which actually warrant that kind of attention. Given BULLRUN's large budget and how easy it is to manipulate software projects[1], it is somewhat suspicious that there just happens
in “The Downside of Encrypting Everything: Virus-Filled Ads Are Harder to Track” · View on HN
I'm surprised Poul-Henning Kamp isn't involved. Linux Foundation have been throwing money at him for the past year[0] to work on an ntpd replacement[1] and he's well-known for his time (and security) nuttery[2]. [0] [link] [1] [link] [2] ▶ this video
in “Attacking the Network Time Protocol [pdf]” · View on HN
His technical prowess are only matched by his privacy champion credentials, see e.g. his Operation ORCHESTRA talk ▶ this video
in “HTTP/2.0 — Bad protocol, bad politics” · View on HN
I am not sure why debian needs to force replace sysvinit, can't they have systemd-debian distro that will have all the shiny stuff in it? and maybe have it grow and if it won't go down with their userbase then they can discontinue it? Everyone moving to systemd seems a bit fishy. C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? There might be some influence on behalf interested governmental parties giving a push to systemd. I don't have a problem with systemd its just I think it should have been an option not a default for server setups. C programs if they are not really carefully coded can be easily hacked by stack smashers, race condition inducers etc. ▶ this video
in “Shall we fork Debian?” · View on HN
This is straight out of NSA's manual to manipulate online discourse. You can read more about it here: * Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media [1] * How Covert Agents Infiltrate The Internet To Manipulate, Deceive, And Destroy Reputations [2] Poul-Henning Kamp, in a hypothetical talk about his work at the NSA, talks about just this. [3] Here's a quote: > The idea is to steer discussions in these forums to or from particular topics (...) and disrupt consensus building against our purposes [1]: [link] [2]: [link] [3]: ▶ this video
in “Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems” · View on HN
Steps for better security 1. use a managed language 2. use a provable language (Haskell, Idris, etc) Effective Psyops Against Standards and Open Software ▶ this video
in “The Heartbleed Bug” · View on HN
I guess you don't agree with Poul-Henning Kamp in his FOSDEM keynote this year: ▶ this video (around 15:00) His claim is that browsers treating websites with self-signed certificates as less secure than non-encrypted websites by displaying big fat warnings is just about the greatest gift we can give to organisations like the NSA. It's not true that there is no material distinction between an active attack and passive eavesdropping. For the NSA to do active MITM attacks on all self-signed https traffic (in a world where all unencrypted http is replaced with self-signed https) would take massively more resources than passively monitoring unencrypted traffic. Plus the odds of them getting caught would be very high (since some people are going to notice that the certificate that shows up on the client is not what the server sent).
in “OpenSSL is written by monkeys (2009)” · View on HN
Is it insane to speculate that pressure is coming from government agencies? In a talk at Fosdem Poul-Henning Kamp talks about the pretty insane timeline with skype and how much it potentially benefited the NSA. ▶ this video
in “America Online to Buy Internet Chat Service for $287 Million (1998)” · View on HN