The National Security Agency is winning its
long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery,
court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools
protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age,
according to newly disclosed documents.s
The agency 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 e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls
of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.
Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet
companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the
government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its
recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely
guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program
code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden,
the former N.S.A. contractor.
Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually
blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine
campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in
the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to
accomplish the same goal by stealth.
The agency, according to the documents and interviews
with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break
codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States
and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not
identify which companies have participated.
The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages
before they were encrypted. In some cases, companies say they were coerced by
the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a
back door. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced
code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards
followed by hardware and software developers around the world.
“For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive,
multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,”
said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for
employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters,
or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of
encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now
exploitable.”
When the British analysts, who often work side by side
with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said,
“those not already briefed were gobsmacked!”
An intelligence budget document makes clear that the
effort is still going strong. “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic
capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic,”
the director of national intelligence, James
R. Clapper Jr., wrote in his budget request for the current year.
In recent months, the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden
have described the N.S.A.’s reach in scooping up vast amounts of communications
around the world. The encryption documents now show, in striking detail, how
the agency works to ensure that it is actually able to read the information it
collects.
The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy
protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that
prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without
a warrant. But it shows that the agency, which was sharply rebuked by a federal
judge in 2011 for violating the rules and misleading the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, cannot necessarily be restrained by
privacy technology. N.S.A. rules permit the agency to store any encrypted
communication, domestic or foreign, for as long as the agency is trying to
decrypt it or analyze its technical features.
The N.S.A., which has specialized in code-breaking since
its creation in 1952, sees that task as essential to its mission. If it cannot
decipher the messages of terrorists, foreign spies and other adversaries, the
United States will be at serious risk, agency officials say.
Just in recent weeks, the Obama administration has called
on the intelligence agencies for details of communications by leaders of
Al Qaeda about a terrorist plot and of Syrian officials’ messages about
the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. If such communications can be
hidden by unbreakable encryption, N.S.A. officials say, the agency cannot do
its work.
But some
experts say the N.S.A.’s campaign to bypass and weaken communications security
may have serious unintended consequences. They say the agency is working at
cross-purposes with its other major mission, apart from eavesdropping: ensuring
the security of American communications.
Some of the agency’s most
intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United
States, including Secure Sockets Layer,
or SSL; virtual private networks,
or VPNs; and the protection used on fourth-generation, or 4G, smartphones. Many
Americans, often without realizing it, rely on such protection every time they
send an e-mail, buy something online, consult with colleagues via their
company’s computer network, or use a phone or a tablet on a 4G network.
For at least
three years, one document says, GCHQ, almost certainly in collaboration with
the N.S.A., has been looking for ways into protected traffic of popular
Internet companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. By 2012,
GCHQ had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s systems, according
to the document. (Google denied giving any government access and said it had no
evidence its systems had been breached).
“The risk is
that when you build a back door into systems, you’re not the only one to
exploit it,” said Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins
University. “Those back doors could work against U.S. communications, too.”
Paul Kocher,
a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the
N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all
encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.
“And they
went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said. He said he
understood the agency’s mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing
it unbridled access to private information.
“The
intelligence community has worried about ‘going dark’ forever, but today they
are conducting instant, total invasion of privacy with limited effort,” he
said. “This is the golden age of spying.”
A Vital
Capability
The
documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York
Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization. They focus on GCHQ but
include thousands from or about the N.S.A.
Intelligence
officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it
might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or
communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations
removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the
value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful
privacy tools.
The files
show that the agency is still stymied by some encryption, as Mr. Snowden
suggested in a question-and-answer
session on The
Guardian’s Web site in June.
“Properly
implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely
on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption
altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text
before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.
The
documents make clear that the N.S.A. considers its ability to decrypt
information a vital capability, one in which it competes with China, Russia and
other intelligence powers.
“In the
future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their
cryptanalytic programs,” a 2007 document said. “It is the price of admission
for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.”
The full
extent of the N.S.A.’s decoding capabilities is known only to a limited group
of top analysts from the so-called Five Eyes: the N.S.A. and its counterparts
in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only they are cleared for the
Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of an American
Civil War battle. A
parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first
battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.
Unlike some
classified information that can be parceled out on a strict “need to know”
basis, one document makes clear that with Bullrun, “there will be NO ‘need to
know.’ ”
Only a small
cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It does not appear
that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of
classified documents referring to the program’s capabilities, methods and
sources.
Ties to
Internet Companies
When the
N.S.A. was founded, encryption was an obscure technology used mainly by
diplomats and military officers. Over the last 20 years, it has become
ubiquitous. Even novices can tell that their exchanges are being automatically
encrypted when a tiny padlock appears next to a Web address.
Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified
N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with
Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their
cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys
or altering their software or hardware.
According to an intelligence budget document leaked by
Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint
Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to
covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs”
to make them “exploitable.” Sigint is the acronym for signals intelligence, the
technical term for electronic eavesdropping.
By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways
inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses
and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors or by
exploiting security flaws, according to the documents. The agency also expected
to gain full unencrypted access to an unnamed major Internet phone call and
text service; to a Middle Eastern Internet service; and to the communications
of three foreign governments.
In one case, after the government learned that a foreign
intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American
manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was
shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.
The 2013 N.S.A. budget request highlights “partnerships
with major telecommunications carriers to shape the global network to benefit
other collection accesses” — that is, to allow more eavesdropping.
At Microsoft, as The Guardian has
reported, the N.S.A. worked with company officials to get
pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook
e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud
storage service.
Microsoft asserted that it had merely complied with
“lawful demands” of the government, and in some cases, the collaboration was
clearly coerced. Some companies have been asked to hand the government the
encryption keys to all customer communications, according to people familiar
with the government’s requests.
N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an
internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a
Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages. If the
necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key
Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.
How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but
independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into
companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods
secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the
keys could have been acquired through legal means. “Approval to release to
non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a
proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”
Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately
weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One
goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards
and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common
encryption method.
Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency
planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute
of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for
Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.
Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal
weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by
the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the
international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”
“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo
says.
Even agency programs ostensibly intended to guard
American communications are sometimes used to weaken protections. The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance,
invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products to the
agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret
N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same
program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with
specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security
products.
By introducing such back doors, the N.S.A. has
surreptitiously accomplished what it had failed to do in the open. Two decades
ago, officials grew concerned about the spread of strong encryption software
like Pretty Good Privacy, designed by a programmer named Phil Zimmermann. The
Clinton administration fought back by proposing the Clipper Chip, which would have
effectively neutered digital encryption by ensuring that the N.S.A. always had
the key.
That proposal met a backlash from an unlikely coalition
that included political opposites like Senator John Ashcroft, the Missouri
Republican, and Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, as well as the
televangelist Pat Robertson, Silicon Valley executives and the American Civil
Liberties Union. All argued that the Clipper would kill not only the Fourth
Amendment, but also America’s global technology edge.
By 1996, the White House backed down. But soon the N.S.A.
began trying to anticipate and thwart encryption tools before they became
mainstream.
Each novel encryption effort generated anxiety. When Mr.
Zimmermann introduced the Zfone, an encrypted phone technology, N.S.A. analysts
circulated the announcement in an e-mail titled “This can’t be good.”
But by 2006, an N.S.A. document notes, the agency had
broken into communications for three foreign airlines, one travel reservation
system, one foreign government’s nuclear department and another’s Internet
service by cracking the virtual private networks that protected them.
By 2010, the Edgehill program, the British
counterencryption effort, was unscrambling VPN traffic for 30 targets and had
set a goal of an additional 300.
But the agencies’ goal was to move away from decrypting
targets’ tools one by one and instead decode, in real time, all of the
information flying over the world’s fiber optic cables and through its Internet
hubs, only afterward searching the decrypted material for valuable
intelligence.
A 2010 document calls for “a new approach for
opportunistic decryption, rather than targeted.” By that year, a Bullrun
briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking
capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls. Its successes
against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining
momentum.
But the agency was concerned that it could lose the
advantage it had worked so long to gain, if the mere “fact of” decryption
became widely known. “These capabilities are among the Sigint community’s most
fragile, and the inadvertent disclosure of the simple ‘fact of’ could alert the
adversary and result in immediate loss of the capability,” a GCHQ document
warned.
Since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures ignited criticism of
overreach and privacy infringements by the N.S.A., American technology
companies have faced scrutiny from customers and the public over what some see
as too cozy a relationship with the government. In response, some companies
have begun to push back against what they describe as government bullying.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook have pressed for
permission to reveal more about the government’s requests for cooperation. One
e-mail encryption company, Lavabit, closed rather than comply with the agency’s
demands for customer information; another, Silent Circle, ended its e-mail
service rather than face such demands.
In effect, facing the N.S.A.’s relentless advance, the
companies surrendered.
Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, wrote a public letter to
his disappointed customers, offering an ominous warning. “Without Congressional
action or a strong judicial precedent,” he wrote, “I would strongly recommend
against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to
the United States.”
Courtesy: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html
