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
This is what NSA's VPN Exploit Team does when it decrypts a VPN.
The National Security Agencys Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking the encrypted traffic of virtual private networks (VPNs) and has developed tools that could potentially uncloak the traffic in the majority of VPNs used to secure traffic passing over the Internet today, according to documents published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel. A slide deck from a presentation by a member of OTPs VPN Exploitation Team, dated September 13, 2010, details the process the NSA used at that time to attack VPNsincluding tools with names drawn from Star Trek and other bits of popular culture.
OTPs VPN exploit team had members assigned to branches focused on specific regional teams, as well as a Cross-Target Support Branch and a custom development team for building specialized VPN exploits. At the regional level, the VPN team representatives acted as liaisons to analysts, providing information on new VPN attacks and gathering requirements for specific targets to be used in developing new ones.
While some VPN technologiesspecifically, those based on the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPTP)have previously been identified as being vulnerable because of the way they exchange keys at the beginning of a VPN session, others have generally been assumed to be safer from scrutiny. But in 2010, the NSA had already developed tools to attack the most commonly used VPN encryption schemes: Secure Shell (SSH), Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption.
The NSA has a specific repository for capturing VPN metadata called TOYGRIPPE. The repository stores information on VPN sessions between systems of interest, including their fingerprints for specific machines and which VPN services theyve connected to, their key exchanges, and other connection data. VPN fingerprints can also be extracted from XKEYSCORE, the NSAs distributed big data store of all recently captured Internet traffic, to be used in identifying targets and developing an attack. Because XKEYSCORE includes data from untasked sourcespeople and systems not designated as under surveillancethe OTP VPN Exploitation Teams presentation requested, Try to avoid relying on (XKEYSCORE) workflows due to legal and logistical issues. But XKEYSCORE, it was noted, is best for attacks on SSH traffic.
Analysis of TOYGRIPPE and XKEYSCORE data, as well as from daily VPN exploits, is fed into BLEAKINQUIRYa metadata database of potentially exploitable VPNs. This database can be searched by NSA analysts for addresses matching targeted individuals or systems and to generate requests for the VPN Exploit crew to convert the "potentially" into an actuality.
When an IPSec VPN is identified and tasked by NSA analysts, according to the presentation, a full take of its traffic is stored in VULCANDEATHGRIP, a VPN data repository. There are similar, separate repositories for PPTP and SSL VPN traffic dubbed FOURSCORE and VULCANMINDMELD, respectively.
The data is then replayed from the repositories through a set of attack scripts, which use sets of preshared keys (PSKs) harvested from sources such as exploited routers and stored in a key database called CORALREEF. Other attack methods are used to attempt to recover the PSK for each VPN session. If the traffic is of interest, successfully cracked VPNs are then processed by a system called TURTLEPOWER and sorted into the NSAs XKEYSCORE full-traffic database, and extracted content is pushed to the PINWALE digital network intelligence content database.
But for those that arent successfully cracked, the VPN Exploit Teams presentation noted, the team works to turn that frown upside down by doing more data collectiontrying to capture IPSec Internet Key Exchange (IKE) and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) traffic during VPN handshakes to help build better attacks. In cases where the keys just cant be recovered, the VPN Exploit Team will contact our friends for help gathering more information on the systems of interest from other data collection sites or doing an end-run by calling on Tailored Access Operations to create access points through exploits of one of the endpoints of the VPN connection.
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