News: 1617878354

So you CAN put back doors into encrypted software. So what our Pritti Home Secretary said is correct and our security services CAN have their data.

... Wait a cotton-picking minute there. I thought the mathematics says its not possible. Two very large primes are all that's needed, and there's no other way in. So presumably either the messages were not encrypted, or the platform got hacked and someone installed a keylogger. Hmm, now which of these is the more likely...?

Or somebody was arrested and on the receiving end of a lot of charges. They decided to open their device so their messages could be read and replied to by the plod in return for less charges. The encryption could have been shit or for Police Specialists you can read another unnamed agency.

No-one every said they couldn't back door encryption, only that it's a monumentally stupid idea. But hey, I'm sure those in power can be trusted not to abuse that power, right?

And they'll be able to stop the "bad guys" from getting the backdoor keys within a couple of hours of them being issued.

Especially when the bad guys and good guys is a matter of opinion

It's very unlikely to have been a straight crack of encrypted data in-flight. If they managed to do that they would certainly not announce the fact.

Much more likely to be trojaned software (like Encrochat), keylogger or traditional human intelligence, followed by a nice big announcement to scare the shit out of the remaining users and drive them to (potentially less secure) communication methods.

You're assuming the crypto was correctly implemented. Doing it right isn't just a matter of picking an algo with a long key length and then weaving some code around it, and I suspect it;s there where the problem was.

I actually caught the interview about this on TV, and if I'm right, the person interviewed accidentally revealed they were (and are) listening in in real time. To me, that suggests a cracked algorithm instead of just a single subverted phone, and I think the people who were selling this may not sleep all that well right now.

As I said before, pissing off a customer base that is mainly composed of criminals strikes me as a good way to add a lot of excitement and possible life shortening events to your existence :).

The mention of "exchanging text messages" in the article implies short payloads and that may have made it easier for them to crack the encryption too. I'm pretty sure that short payloads are significantly easier to crack if you know the encryption and there's often "padding" put into short messages in real encryption to make it harder to crack.

So, yeah, poorly implemented crypto is a likely method of interception. I wonder how much they may have to reveal in the subsequent court cases on their methods?

The mathematics doesn't say its not possible. Decades of trying to factor (or whatever) quickly and failing says maybe it's not possible. Decades of trying to prove it's not possible and failing says it still might be.

I wish people understood this subtlety better now our entire digital world, global financial system and several whole currencies all rely on modern crypto.

"So presumably either the messages were not encrypted, or the platform got hacked and someone installed a keylogger."

Or the service mediated the key exchange and kept copies or was being monitored.. End to end encryption is fine so long as nobody else knows the keys.

Why don't the police cut out the middleman and set up their own encrypted messaging service as a honeytrap? It worked for the NSA with tor...

I would be very surprised if this did not happen. It is an obvious tactic and the cops are not that stupid.

I was wondering what they do with 28 tons of cocaine ? It is not a small bag that can be tossed into a bin and forgotten about. Burning it would have interesting effects on anyone down wind of the incinerator.

It is an obvious tactic and the cops are not that stupid.

They are in the US. For decades now police departments specifically discriminate against the intelligent claiming intelligent people don't want to stay cops, but instead move on the become lawyers and the like. As a result, the average cop IQ in the US is only 104. It's probably a factor in why the US has such a large problem with cops shooting people when it's not justified. For perspective, the average IQ of enlisted soldiers in the US armed forces is 109, and officers in the US armed forces is in the low 120's.

https://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=95836

The difference in training between countries is a bit pronounced as well.

UK: Join and commence a 3 month training programme, which qualifies the holder to use handcuffs, and a truncheon for the 3 years worth of on the job training and mentorship. So 3 years and 3 months on from joining you've qualified to work on your own. Two years after this is completed (with a satisfactory service history) then you could apply to become one of a few thousand armed police officers nationwide, and if you could pass dozens of stringent courses with a very low pass rate designed to weed out undesirables and individuals without a high enough level of competence then you might eventually be allowed to carry a firearm. If you use it at all expect to be grilled mercilessly and if it transpires to be an inappropriate use of force then you'll be charged with murder.

Random US Town: join and get given a police badge, handcuffs and a pistol and shotgun for your police car on the first day. And um, want an assault rifle or a minigun mounted on a humvee or anti tank mine proof assault vehicle? Available through our military disposals program for your town if you ask nicely at a huge discount! And try not to kill too many people; it causes bad PR and we might fire you.

To be an officer in the US armed forces you have to have a tertiary degree but I don't know whether that makes much of a difference in this context.

There's a shaggy dog story I was told about that. One of the South American countries had found a stash of marching powder in a rural area. They were worried about a cartel trying to get it back. So they decided to incinerate it quickly at a disused, local but out of the way industrial facility. Something went wrong and loads of it went unburned, up the chimney to be carried by the winds elsewhere.

Also this happened to the BBC journalist Quentin Sommerville at a drugs incineration.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=NAssPedIdbk

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=NAssPedIdbk

"I would be very surprised if this did not happen."

The way that Apple continuously go on about how they are committed to user's privacy etc often makes me wonder if they are a TLA front organisation!

N.b. there is evidence of this sort of thing in the past - when Mint launched their "global SIM card" there was significant amount of oppostion from the US authorities as this allowed bad-agents to have mobile phone accounts that they "couldn't track" which clearly registered with some targets as a couple of years later a US General in Afghanistan, showing a lack of judgment, boasted that they were having great succcess against the Taliban as "they all use Mint phones ... as soon as we see one connect to a cell tower we send in a drone to take them out" - result was Taliban immediately stopped using all mobiles and relied on commuinicating by passing messages personn-to-person only.

Apple do try to control one particular aspect with respect to iPhones

"Apple does not 'let bad guys use iPhones on screen'

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/26/apple-does-not-let-bad-guys-use-iphones-on-screen

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/26/apple-does-not-let-bad-guys-use-iphones-on-screen

"I was wondering what they do with 28 tons of cocaine"

Next time you are at a demo and the police seem to have an extremely cocky/overpowering attitude just think back to that 28 tonnes of the purest.......

Rather suspect the Albanians running the cocaine import business have already cut out the middlemen .. probably quite literally.

One does have to wonder whether such thinking extends to threaten the state and the fate of the dollar, which has for decades at least, and is still blatantly used as the default prime medium for the purchase and trafficking of drugs.

Looks like new market opportunities for certain types...

Maybe there are organizations out there that would pay developers to create their own encryption apps? This is actually a good example of how encryption that is sold as "100% secure" ... in reality is not 100% safe, regardless of where you use it.

GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY!

Hmmm... 27.64 tonnes - that's not to be sniffed at!

Hey Charlie, please don't blow on the snow or the ice, even though at it's base it is free, this crystal sugar feels nice..

Way too much for personal use. With that sort of tonnage they really should be using the wholesale price and not the retail one.

Getting prepared for the restart of arena-sized concerts in Europe?

Didn't the previous encrypted phone network get busted because the cops hacked the software update servers and introduced a backdoor'ed update the handsets then downloaded.

You know, like SolarWinds...

I guess its just another SupplyChainAttack(tm)

One way or another, it almost certainly didn't involve decrypting the messages in flight. One end or the other was compromised and made to dump the messages in clear.

I'm obviously way out of date on my drug slang as back in the day blow as a slang term meant (in the UK) cannabis. *

Has the US blow = coke taken over everywhere now, or is it just a matter of a US writer authoring this article?

* No surprise given my age as its many years since I had los of friends who did drugs (AFAIK, who knows maybe plenty of my friends do decades later but I'm just unaware of it!)

Indeed, blow "was" definitely street slang for canabis, at least in my day in the UK. Still that was a while ago...

That's a huge amount of recreational drugs for a population of x million people.

busted today, not even like that is the total.

At some point someone is going to do the math and realise that a large percentage of people in Belgium don't consider doing lines of coke to be immoral even if it is illegal. These people are being criminalised despite a dominant ideology of the population.

recreational drugs are fun, by definition.

anon because its illegal to think this way, not because its bad.

A large part of the population may well think "what's the harm".

At least the same percentage of the population would probably also react badly if somebody on drugs then stabs a member of their family while totally out of it, or ploughs a family down while driving under the influence.

I'm not particularly against the idea of allowing drugs to be sold legally, however as a quid pro quid I would expect a life sentence (and by that I do actually mean life) for people who make the choice to take drugs and then kill whilst under their influence.