A new round of NSA documents by Edward Snowden went online late Sunday. The latest archives PDFs published by Der Spiegel showed five countries' online alliance with the Five Eyes project aimed at spying on other countries. The USA, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – appear to have teamed up to breach the barriers of Internet security protocols.
The files that they leaked may be a bit old, as they cover the period from 2010 to 2012, but they offer some interesting details about how the spies were trying to break the strong online encryption.
A 18-13 (2011) XNUMX file (PDF) of XNUMX June, for example, mentions tempting details about "A possible technique for deanonymizing TOR network users".
The investigation reveals that the Secret Service Secret Service of GCHQ believed they could violate Tor.
The document is marked "UK TOP SECRET STRAP1 COMINT”And states:
We will present a technique that can deanonymise the given TOR web-browsing packet times between the client and the security node and the packet times from the output node filtered into a single circuit. The percentage of false positives appears to be fairly low and so we suggest that we develop this technique.
The required data are not currently collected. In order for this technique to work, the following additional data sources are required:
- Second-accurate packet connects to the TOR-out packet-specific output nodes and is characterized by a unique identifier circuit.
- Second-accurate packet connection between customers, TOR nodes and TOR security node. These data could be obtained by using SIGINT [signal information] or running guard nodes. SIGINT's solution would require up-to-date feeds of consensus documents (TORs). The IP addresses of the TOR could then be extracted from the consensus documents for filtering them from the SIGINT system.
At the time of writing, JTRIG [Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group] explores data collection from output nodes, and ICTR-FSP is experimenting with a guard nodes data stream.
They finally concluded that “a wider control” was necessary to be able to have better results in the “false positive rate”. He recommended that Brit ghosts should try to deanonymise using JTRIG TOR as a first step.
Another slide of the GCHQ (PDF) is presented because the anonymous network is bothering government interceptions.
"Very 'bad' people use Tor," he says, adding, "Covert Services hide content on the Web that still exists!", "It 's almost impossible to understand who is talking to whom,"
Below the documents mention PGP decryption efforts (which are still safe (?)), AES (which is constantly under pressure, but there is no evidence that it has been violated) and OTR (safe but its application found to be problematic ).
Shared secret keys or passwords are required to achieve a VPN breach before they can decipher the SSL protocols.
For VPN hacking, the date versionof the leaked file, hacking into Reuters or the victim's computer was necessary. As a last resort a court order would force the company's system administrator to hand over the SSL private keys.
A Transparency of it NSA also states that the SSH service had been successfully broken by the agents.
It has long been known that Skype belongs to the NSA and clearly should not be used by anyone seeking its security. Similarly, there were no surprises for the fact that PPTP is broken.
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