National Security Agency

Leave a comment December 22, 2013 Thom Langford

RSA has had a tough few years; the subject of a high profile phishing attack in March 2011 resulting in the loss of information related to their SecureID product. They denied it was an issue until three months later when information gained from that attack was used against other companies, including Lockheed Martin, and had to subsequently replace a large number of the tokens.

In September this year they recommended that customers of their BSafe product should stop using the built in, default, encryption algorithm because it contained a weakness that the NSA could exploit using a backdoor and therefore would be vulnerable to interception and reading. How very open and forthright of RSA I thought at the time. Despite the potential damage they may be doing to their brand by giving this information freely out, they are doing so in their customers interests and at the same time offering secure alternatives. It reminded me of the early nineties and the pushback against the Clipper chip, with RSA at the forefront protecting client interests and pushing back against the spooks of the three letter agencies of the USA. Here is what D. James Bidzos said at the time:

“We have the system that they’re most afraid of,” Bidzos says. “If the U.S. adopted RSA as a standard, you would have a truly international, interoperable, unbreakable, easy-to-use encryption technology. And all those things together are so synergistically theatening to the N.S.A.’s interests that it’s driving them into a frenzy.”

Powerful stuff. The newly formed Electronic Frontiers Foundation would have been proud.

Now this is where it gets interesting and has raised the shackles of many in the Twittersphere and internet echo chambers. A few days ago it was revealed that the real reason for RSA to have used a flawed products for so many years was because the NSA paid them to. It wasn’t a huge amount of money although it possibly helped save the division that runs BSafe in RSA that was struggling at the time.

Businesses change. Leadership changes. Market forces steer a company in different direction to one a degree or another. To my mind though, to deliberately weaken your own product for financial gain is extraordinarily unwise. By taking the money, RSA have declared that profit is above patriotism, whatever your view of patriotism is. If they took no money at all, there would be a good defence that the decision was taken in the national interest and to work harmoniously with the governmental agencies that protect the USA from danger. Unfortunately organisations that have relied on RSA’s products to secure their data have been let down simply to make a fast buck,

In October this year Art Coviello spoke about “Anonymity being the enemy of Security” at his Keynote at RSA Europe. That statement takes on a very different viewpoint now.

The response has been fairly unanimous, but here is one that got me thinking about my relationship with RSA:

I personally wouldn’t go this far as I go to network with friends, peers and colleagues, as well as listen to folks from the industry talk and present; I don’t necessarily go to listen to RSA as such. However this kind of reaction is going to have an impact on RSA that is likely to be felt for a number of years to come. Most security people I know are somewhat distrusting in the first place (hence why they are in security very often!). To have these revelations is going to have an impact both in their mainstream business as well as their conference business, so often seen as the gold standard of conferences globally.

If the last few years were tough for RSA, what is the next few years going to be like for a giant in our industry?

Leave a comment November 26, 2013 Thom Langford

This may be quite a challenging post as I potentially expose myself as a willing victim of an Orwellian world, if not a supporter of it. Nothing could be further from the truth, but I do think certain aspects of the forthcoming argument need to be aired.

I am amazed that people are surprised and angered to hear that the US and UK governments are “spying” on their citizens. I recall as a schoolboy in Dover in the eighties seeing a large installation on the cliffs of Dover, and it was common knowledge that it was used to intercept telephone and radio signals for the government. The thought was, and still is, a comforting one that various powers-that-be are intercepting communications in a morally correct albeit secretive manner.

While the scale of the interceptions highlighted through the Snowden leaks did somewhat surprise me, the fact that it was happening did not, in fact I expected it. My surprise was perhaps a factor of the rapid growth of the internet and the related technologies, but I was able to rationalise that with the many different methods of communications available to so many people on the planet.

I don’t agree with government back doors inside industry systems, and I don’t agree with the wholesale handing over of encryption keys to them either, but I do agree with the discrete and specific targeting of certain communications of “interest” and the decryption and handing over of those communications by the relevant company to the government in response to a valid and legal request. But it has to start with the interception, analysis, trending and prediction of traffic in the first place.

There, I said it.

We then move to the current advice being given to parents about monitoring and controlling their internet access and social media use. This type of advice is warmly embraced by most people, as one would expect, because children cannot possible be expected to know and understand the types of threats they might be exposed to on the internet, and too naïve to be able to deal with them. They do not have the experience or understanding of what could happen if they use the internet without some kind of supervision and monitoring, and as responsible parents we are there to protect, educate and support.

I think there is a parallel here, namely that the general population simply does not understand the kind of threats that are out there, and how monitoring communications and the internet is a fundamental way of ensuring that we don’t find out the hard way. There has to be a certain level of trust in the various government bodies that the monitoring is done for specific purposes, in the same way a child will have a level of trust that a parent monitoring contacts and online activity is doing so not to harm the child but to protect them from needless abuse and worse.

This parallel is not a clear one I understand; there have been abuses of power, and the politics of government is a dirty business at the best of times, but I pay taxes and participate in my community for the benefit of the greater good and therefore expect a certain level of protection from the powers that be. I chose to live in a somewhat paternalistic society because it benefits me and I get to enjoy a largely violence free lifestyle as a result.

Were you surprised by these revelations? Angered or resigned to them? I will continue to encrypt my most personal of data and practise good information security next time i do my banking in a Starbucks; not to protect myself from the government but from the criminals. I will leave the criminals to the government.