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New NSA leak reveals scope of agencys war against crypto

By: mikeroweRules12

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New NSA leak reveals scope of agencys war against crypto - Video

NSA Waits until Christmas Eve to Release Documents Admitting Illegal Spying - AllGov
NSA Waits until Christmas Eve to Release Documents Admitting Illegal Spying - AllGov.

By: Cotherman

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NSA Waits until Christmas Eve to Release Documents Admitting Illegal Spying - AllGov - Video

NSA directs security officials not to leak classified documents to media
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By: ABP NEWS

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NSA directs security officials not to leak classified documents to media - Video

New material leaked by Edward Snowden shows which Internet security protocols the NSA had beaten as of 2012 and which encryption tools were still stymying cyber spies.

Digital spies in the National Security Administration cracked Skype's encryption back in 2011 and can make quick work of the VPNs many businesses believe make their communications secure.

But more robust security protocols and encryption techniques may still be secure from prying NSA eyes, according to documents revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Der Spiegel has the rundown on the NSA's battle against what its training documents described as the "threat" of secure Internet communication. Snowden's documentation is several years old now, of course. Whether or not U.S. cyber spies have managed to crack some of the toughest nuts in the intervening years, like Tor network communications, isn't known.

First, the security layers that the NSA considered to be "trivial," "minor," or "moderate" challenges to get through as of 2012. These include such tasks as simply monitoring a document as it travels across the Internet, spying on Facebook chats, and decrypting mail.ru emails, according to the Snowden documents.

But there are others that NSA cryptologists have had a much tougher time defeating, Der Spiegel noted, as documented in their sorting of threats "into five levels corresponding to the degree of the difficulty of the attack and the outcome, ranging from 'trivial' to a 'catastrophic.'"

"Things first become troublesome at the fourth level," according to Der Spiegel, which culled its report from a specific NSA presentation on Internet security.

As of 2012, the agency was having "major problems in its attempts to decrypt messages sent through heavily encrypted email service providers like Zoho or in monitoring users of the Tor network," the newspaper reported. Other "major," or fourth-level challenges included open-source protocols like Truecrypt and OTR instant-messaging encryption.

"Experts agree it is far more difficult for intelligence agencies to manipulate open source software programs than many of the closed systems developed by companies like Apple and Microsoft. Since anyone can view free and open source software, it becomes difficult to insert secret back doors without it being noticed," Der Spiegel noted.

The toughest method of Internet communication for the NSA to crack? It's not any one dark Internet tool but rather a bunch of them layered on top of each other, according to the Snowden documents.

Excerpt from:
NSA Docs Reveal Spy-Proof Encryption Tools

NSA's PRISM access to Skype keys and PSTN gateways let them reach out and touch calls worldwide.

A National Security Agency document published this week by the German news magazine Der Spiegel from the trove provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shows that the agency had full access to voice, video, text messaging, and file sharing fromtargeted individuals over Microsofts Skype service. The access, mandated by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant, was part of the NSAs PRISM program and allowed sustained Skype collection in real time from specific users identified by their Skype user names.

The nature of the Skype data collection was spelled out in an NSA document dated August 2012 entitled Users Guide for PRISM Skype Collection. The document details how to task the capture of voice communications from Skype by NSAs NUCLEON system, which allows for text searches against captured voice communications. It also discusses how to find text chat and other data sent between clients in NSAs PINWALE digital network intelligence database.

The full capture of voice traffic began in February of 2011 for Skype in and Skype out callscalls between a Skype user and a land line or cellphone through a gateway to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), captured through warranted taps into Microsofts gateways. But in July of 2011, the NSA added the capability of capturing peer-to-peer Skype communicationsmeaning that the NSA gained the ability to capture peer-to-peer traffic and decrypt it using keys provided by Microsoft through the PRISM warrant request.

The NSA was then able to task any Skype traffic that passed over networks it monitored or by exploitation of a targeted users system. NSA receives Skype collection via prism when one of the peers is a (FISA Amendments Act Section 702) tasked target, the Skype collection guide stated. Because Skype has no central servers, the guide explained, for multiparty calls, Skype creates a mesh-network, where users are connected together through multiple peer-to-peer links. Instant Messages sent to this group of meshed participants can be routed through any participant. If any participant in a chat was monitored, the NSA could capture all of the IM traffic in the shared chat.

Initially, NSA analysts had to piece together voice communications between peers because they were carried over separate streams, but a service added by August of 2012 by the NSAs Cryptanalysis and Exploitation Services (CES) automatically stitched both audio streams of a conversation together. As of 2012, however, analysts still had to search for associated video from a call session to match it up with audio in a tool called the Digital Network Intelligence Presenter (DNIP).

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Newly published NSA documents show agency could grab all Skype traffic