CIA hackers uncovered a technique to break into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages in real time, until the transmission might be secured by the apps sending them, based on the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps such as Signal have spiked since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence experts have assigned the spike to popular worry between activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump might use the nation”s intelligence apparatus to focus on them.
On Tuesday, many took to social media to fret over the extent to which messaging apps that they believed secure may not be.
But Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Open Whisper Systems, said, if anything, the data show that apps and Signal like it are working.
“End-to-end encryption has pushed intelligence agencies from unfettered access to mass surveillance to a world where they must use expensive, high-risk, targeted attacks against individuals to gain access to their information,” he said. “If you use these kinds of attacks on a massive scale, it increases the risk of detection. So to break into people’s phones and get access to encrypted messages, these agencies now must be very selective. I think that’s a good thing.”
Because end-to-end encryption implies that the people have the keys to unlock the scrambled message they are sharing, outsiders attempting to intercept the communication would be unable to understand it without the key.
But in accordance with the leaked documents, the CIA appears to get bypassed this obstacle by hacking the phones used to send messages or make calls. Hackers who gain access to a device’s operating system could manage to record calls and messages in real time, as a person is speaking into their microphone or typing on their keyboard – before the message is actually sent.
“Once you’ve malware on an operating-system level, you can record keystrokes as they’re being typed,” said Jeremiah Grossman, SentinelOne’s chief of security strategy.
Security specialists advised that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like WhatsApp and Signal to do so.
“The worst thing which might happen is for users to lose faith in encryption-enabled tools and stop using them,” wrote Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The dark side of this story is that the documents confirm the CIA holds on to security vulnerabilities in software and devices ” including Android phones, iPhones and Samsung television – that millions of people around the world rely on.”
It was not immediately clear how many zero-day vulnerabilities were revealed Tuesday, though WikiLeaks wrote in a news release accompanying the leak the data included 24 such vulnerabilities for Android devices alone. The data dump provided a detailed list of attacks the CIA had used to get access to Android and Apple devices, including several mentions of malicious software the government appears to have purchased.
For years, technology companies have requested the government to provide details about zero days it discovers and vulnerabilities. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known.
The agreement has been long denounced by critics for being opaque and difficult to enforce, while allowing the government unchecked authority to decide when to keep information that may compromise millions of devices to itself.
The CIA cache seems to validate these concerns, experts said, and point to a need for greater information sharing between tech companies and government agencies.
“If there’s a vulnerability in the wild and it is not making it into the hands of the vendor so it may be resolved, something is broken,” Rice said. “This ultimately strains tech companies’ relationship with the U.S. government.”
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