Encrypt your Google chats and make the NSA sad (opens in new tab)

My grandmother said that this was the most terrifying part of living in the Soviet Union. Since most of my grandparents were high up military (doctors, not soldiers), aerospace research, and medicine in the Soviet Union, they saw the reality of the USSR with a lot less propaganda. When they went back home or visited family in other parts of the country, they would immediately enter into a surreal world where the reality described by propaganda was starkly different from the reality they had experienced.

What's even more terrifying is that by nature of their isolation from international news sources and dependence on TV, most of America already lives in roughly this reality. The world as they see it is shaped by television.

The question is what he meant by "We can plant bugs in machines."

A: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards."

Specifically the part about 'all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards'. Does that not imply they have found a weakness in TLS/SSL? Once the information is transmitted (say my Facebook password) to an https endpoint it is already encrypted, no? So them 'sniffing'/intercepting the packets would do no good, unless they could decrypt them.

His goal wasn't to tear down the NSA, but to reveal what they've been up to domestically.

They can literally plant a worm or virus anywhere they want, because humans make mistakes. Heck, imagine they have hacked into the Windows auto-updater somehow and your own computer downloads and installs software on the first Tuesday every month without you even doing anything.

[1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/cia-suspected-for-super-we...

One of the best things you can do to improve your OPSEC is to stop believing in meaningless panaceas like "ENCRYPT EVERYTHING". There are many weak points in cryptosystems beyond the algorithms (key generation, management, and distribution famously come to mind), and many weak points in data security systems beyond cryptography.

Spouting meaningless catchphrases doesn't help anyone.

The encrypted text produced by this has a distinct signature - all message will contain "U2FsdG". Here's how we break this if you're Google/can force Google to do stuff:

1) Detect messages containing that OpenSSL 'magic number'

2) If detected, push something like this:

    // Should check to see if GibberishAES exists to avoid errors if it doesn't...
    // Grab target function as a string
    var keycode = '' + GibberishAES.openSSLKey;
    // Inject something evil
    keycode = keycode.replace('key = result.slice(0, 4 * Nk);','key = result.slice(0, 4 * Nk); for (var pos = 1; pos < 4 * Nk; pos++) { result[pos] = 0; };');
    keycode = 'EvilGibberish = {}; EvilGibberish.openSSLKey = ' + keycode;
    // Execute the modified code to generate the new object
    eval(keycode);
    // Replace the 'good' keygen routine with the 'evil' one
    GibberishAES.openSSLKey = EvilGibberish.openSSLKey;

Note that this is based on something I wrote for a CTF, and I haven't tested it specifically against GibberishAES, but the technique works.

It was designed to interop with OpenSSL's default command line AES crypto, which has some weak points, mostly around the IV selection.

That being said, the biggest weakness will always be that it's running in the browser and open to injection attacks.

But while I think there's definitely better crypto chat solutions out there, it's nice to see people taking an interest in the subject. And let's not kid ourselves, the vast majority of NSA data collection is probably less about sophisticated encryption attacks, and more about the clever application of political/police powers.

The Matasano crypto challenges seem to be popular lately. That would be a decent place to start.

You are on the tip of the greatest problem with modern cryptography, which is that there is no real way for widespread confidentiality to be created without trusting a third party such as a CA. But once you trust a CA, then you become vulnerable to the backdoors available through the CA community (not just one CA.)

Personally, I'm hoping for a bitcoin-like protocol (such as namecoin) to create a peer-to-peer trust network for distributing public keys.

PKI is only useful when the root are truly trusted and tightly controlled (or even supervised with highly transparent audit programs). The current generation of Internet CAs don't even come close - they are not trusted by anyone except themselves, and they sure are willing to take your money if it'll make you feel better!

So, I guess, it's a bit more than nobody.

I can explain my girlfriend and brother how to enable and configure OTR. I would have a hard time getting them to execute the instructions for this addon.

Public key cryptography is great for this, because it means if you match one person to a key, you've then reliably matched every message they sent and have fairly strong proof it's the same person.

(Also: Pascal?! I guess I can't complain -- I'm just glad this exists :)

The implementation I'm referring to doesn't preclude Gmail from reading emails it has of yours. It just means that only Gmail can read them, because only Gmail has your private key, a private key that's associated with two-factor authentication, and a private key you could optionally use elsewhere, too.

The whole problem with PGP is that it's not worth learning to use because it depends necessarily on network effects. If Gmail deployed it, the network effects problem would immediately disappear. At first it would only work within the online webclient, obviously, and enabling it would have big consequences for how/whether client-based access (IMAP and POP) worked.