8 ms·

A Few Thoughts on Ray Ozzie’s “Clear” Proposal

104 points by Hagelin 8y ago

throwaway84742 8y ago
But why? Why give the government such a ripe target for abuse? Why tilt the balance of power even further in its favor?
- SolarNet 8y ago
  Also a good question, but this post focused only on why it's a stupid idea technically on purpose.
  - throwaway84742 8y ago
    Point taken. He briefly talks about “policy” in the beginning. Policy is the instrument through which the ruling class gradually strips away individual freedoms. We need to prominently feature freedom in these conversations, because ultimately that’s what at stake here.
- amelius 8y ago
  Because now there is a patent, the government can start forcing companies to implement it. And the patent owner will profit. Quite smart, actually.
  - numbsafari 8y ago
    Except prior art? I mean, clearly there’s a difference between “blows up” and “destroys all the key material”, but clearly Apple can point to prior art here.
- nine_k 8y ago
  Because every organization strives for more power, whether its members admit it or not. The very idea of "checks and balances" is that different organizations would strive for power on opposite directions, thus preventing each other from gaining much.
- allenz 8y ago
  Many people, especially those outside the tech community, do not view law enforcement as an adversary. In the US, the balance that we have struck is that the government cannot search our property, except upon probable cause (fourth amendment). While I personally don't like it, I think that warrant-based key escrow is reasonable from a policy perspective.
  - throwaway84742 8y ago
    In post-FISA world where a campaign of a presidential candidate was wiretapped under false pretenses, this view of the world is criminally naive.
shakna 8y ago
> It literally refers to a giant, ultra-secure vault that will have to be maintained individually by different phone manufacturers We can't even trust manufacturers to provide updates in most cases. Placing that much trust in them is nothing short of lunacy.
IAmEveryone 8y ago
CAs seem to be able to keep their private keys safe. Why should phone companies be less competent? They certainly have far more money to devote to it. In any case, Ozzie’s proposal shows that the technological argument has always been more of an attempt to circumvent the political discussion. The tech community loves the idea of subverting the law with technology when it doesn’t suit them. The Federal,Reserve is just a private bank run by Jews to enslave America? Bitcoin! I wanna trade drugs and child porn? Tor! (And bitcoin). That dynamic is undemocratic. Whatever you may think about the US government, it is still far more legitimate to make these decisions than some guy in a basement and the CXOs of Google and Facebook. Moving the center of power from the public sphere to mighty techno-wizards may seem appealing as long as you can culturally identify with them. But if it comes to pass, it will be Comcast and Lockheed Martin that control the networks, not you and me.
- mtgx 8y ago
  Robert Graham had a rebuttal, too, and he mentions how Let's Encrypt for instance is quite vulnerable to sophisticated attackers employing DNS spoofing attacks against it: https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/04/no-ray-ozzie-hasnt-solved-crypto.html https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/04/no-ray-ozzie-hasnt-solved... Also, I think most would agree that CAs are quite terrible at security. It's part of the reason why everyone thinks the CA system sucks and is not trustworthy and it's also why Google has been pushing for Certificate Transparency to be able to verify if the CAs (or people hacking the CAs) are misbehaving. But it's still a patch on a broken system. And look what's been happening with Symantec, too, the largest CA. They were terrible at managing the infrastructure in a secure manner. There are thousands of different CAs. Most are probably insecure or hacked, we just haven't learned about it yet. Also, if you read Green's post, he mentions how this wouldn't be like the CA/software signing system at all. In those systems, you can revoke the certificate. If someone gets the master key for 500 million iPhones, those phones will either need to be bricked or they will remain vulnerable forever. If the NSA/FBI would learn that the system was compromised, they'd never tell us about it either, because they'd know people would then be pushing for the removal of the system, and they wouldn't want that after fighting for so long for something like it. I think Ozzie is being very irresponsible pushing for this. And the reason he is being this irresponsible is because he has a patent on it (Green links to it in the post), so he'd get royalty for billions and billions of phones for the next 20 years if implemented. That's really his main goal here. Ozzie wants all the credit and money for it, but I bet he's not going to take any liability for when the system is inevitably broken.
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FascinatedBox 8y ago
> Also, when a phone is unlocked with Clear, a special chip inside the phone blows itself up. no thanks
- pdpi 8y ago
  Assuming “blows itself up” means it’s bricked rather than “does a Samsung”, I’m ok with that. As the article explains, it’s the only form of intrusion detection in the whole thing
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weinzierl 8y ago
> [..] and keep the secret key in a “vault” where hopefully it will never be needed. That's only in bullet point one and where it already falls apart.
prepend 8y ago
I’m not sure the benefit to Apple or other phone manufacturers. This looks like a substantial cost with zero benefit to those others than law enforcement. And substantial new risk for misuse or abuse. What’s Ozzie’s true motivation? Is he looking to start a company running Clear and raking in patent revenue? I get why the governments want this, but not why a citizen would propose this. If it weren’t Ray Ozzie, I would think this was just part of some propaganda push.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  Money. His true motivation is money. Secondary to that is prestige; he "solved" this problem.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    Do you personally know him or is this just speculation ? Because most entrepreneurs aren't running businesses primarily for the money.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    You might be right, but you’re guessing. I’m pretty pro-crypto. I’m an anarchist. I am generally oriented towards non-governmental solutions to everything, including violence. But even me, even with that bias, I still worry quite often about what evil can lurk behind cryptographic structures, and what effect wide availability of strong crypto will have on that. I don’t know that it will be positive or negative... my gut says positive, but I worry. And so it’s not crazy to me to think Ozzie might be legitimately worried about people’s safety.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  > I’m not sure the benefit to Apple or other phone manufacturers. This looks like a substantial cost with zero benefit to those others than law enforcement. The benefit is that law enforcement has access to relevant information. Society has a vested interest in this provided it doesn't infringe any other rights. It's why warrants exist. If you have the ability to respect a warrant without hurting your customers, it should be illegal not to do so. Obviously there are significant technical issues, which is why this is contentious; those are outside the scope of this comment.
DoctorOetker 8y ago
I don't see anything new in the alleged proposal, this is the same old crypto war. This is "just" key escrow. One might as well propose to have the manufacturers build in the governments public key (and autobrick phone usage) such that the phone can detect if it is really the government reading the phone. Another note: "Ozzie’s proposal relies fundamentally on the ability of manufacturers to secure massive amounts of extremely valuable key material against the strongest and most resourceful attackers on the planet. " This is not true: the phone encrypts the users passcode against the manufacturers public key. If the government tries to read the phone, it will get the encrypted passcode (useless) and send it to the manufacturer who decrypts the passcode. A single private key is not massive amounts of information. Not that it changes anything about protection needs: wheither its a piece of paper containing the say 4096 bits (512 bytes), or in Matthew Greens misinterpretation billions of 512 bytes (half a terrabyte) on a single HDD, they both have the same value. The whole code base needs similar protection anyway: their bootloaders already are signed by the manufacturer. All this centralization is bad, leave the crypto genie out of the bottle please...
- kurthr 8y ago
  I do prefer the idea of storing it on paper... at least it's a little easier to lock up. Even a big camera will only take a few thousand pictures before it fills up, and physical access is a lot easier to enforce. If we make 2 billion phones a year (Apple itself is just over 200M) and you have a line printer running full blast (66 lines = 1page per sec) you could do Apple with one printer... and the world in 10. It would be a lot of boxes of paper though... about a box an hour. edit: to be clear I was assuming that almost every dot in the matrix was a valid bit and there were 66 keys per page... 80 or even 132 columns at 7x5 wouldn't be enough for 4096 bits otherwise.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    impressive calculation for the per phone case! but as I wrote, its not necessary in Ozzie's scheme: Apple only needs to store the single private key. All the phones contain the same public key corresponding to it. All phones encrypt the user passcode to the same public key. When a user tries to unlock his own phone with his correct passcode, the phone encrypts his passcode and arrives at thee same encrypted key, unlocking the phone. When the government seizes the phone, with a special device they have the phone show the encrypted pass code, dump the encrypted GB's of encrypted phone contents, and burn an irreversible efuse in the processor disabling it. They send the encrypted passcode to Apple, who verifies its the government indeed. Apple uses its single private key to decrypt the user passcode. Apple sends this pass code to the government. The government can decrypt the image. In the proposal there is no need for a massive database of key material. It's nonsense. (in practice Apple would use treshold crypography, so that at least k out of n private keys each belonging to specially trained and screened employees are necessary to decrypt) (in practice each phone has a hardcoded random nonce in efuses and instead of encrypting the user passcode, it encrypts [passcode+nonce], otherwise the government could just bruteforce 10^4 encryptions to the public key) I am only saying that this can be done efficiently, not saying that I agree with the desirability of key escrow. This idea of key escrow is as old as cryptography.
OliverJones 8y ago
We need a new way of thinking about caches of secrets. It comes from this unpleasant truth: all secrets eventually leak. The evidence of the past few years teaches us that even state actors with unlimited resources cannot prevent their secrets from leaking. A "leak" here happens when a trusted entity loses control of the secret to one or more untrusted and malicious entities. That's just a definition, not a claim that any particular government, company, or person is a trusted entity. To counter this, we need multiple layers of defense. One is the business of bricking the phones when the leaked secrets are exploited. That makes it plain that the secret has leaked. It's a valuable layer of defense. Another is to make the secrets have limited useful lifetimes. Expiration and revocation for TLS certificates is a way to do that. Credit/debit card numbers can be deactivated and replaced rapidly. That's another way to limit the lifetime of a secret. Ozzie's proposal does not include a way to limit secrets' lifetimes. (Social Security numbers are problematic secrets: they too have unlimited lifetimes.) A third layer is making the secrets have limited utility. If debit cards had daily spending limits, their secret numbers would be less useful than they are today, for example. Day-one exploits are secrets with vast utility, for another example. Ozzie proposes a secret to unlock an entire phone. How about limiting that to, say, the phone's call log or SMS log? A fourth layer is to keep the caches of secrets as small as possible, so a breach affects as few people as possible. Ozzie proposes the opposite of this. A fifth layer: holders of caches of secrets must know they are strictly liable for breaches proportional to the damage they do. It must not matter whether the breach was due to negligence, carelessness, espionage, or salt water rusting out the safe after a storm. Large scale key escrow cache systems will never be able to meet this standard: nation states won't honor that liability, nor will they pay private companies enough to cover the insurance for it. (Strict liability is not unprecedented: workers' compensation and the vaccine injury victims' compensation fund are two reasonably successful examples.) People, companies, and governments holding secrets necessarily must consider what happens when (not if) they leak, and provide at least some defenses in depth like these. Ozzie's proposal has weak and incomplete in-depth defenses. That's why it's dangerous.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  What if the proposal is changed so that the keys do not need to be kept forever? What if Apple is allowed (or even required) to publicize the private key(s) after, say, 10 years?
tosser00005 8y ago
He talks about “massive amounts of extremely valuable key material“ needed to be stored for billions of devices. It’s not like this would be Fort Knox. All that data could be stored on a couple of USB sticks which, really, makes it even scarier. Someone could hold the entire contents in the palm of their hand walk away with everything.
- kardos 8y ago
  The article makes exactly that point: > If ever a single attacker gains access to that vault and is able to extract, at most, a few gigabytes of data (around the size of an iTunes movie), then the attackers will gain unencrypted access to every device in the world. Even better: if the attackers can do this surreptitiously, you’ll never know they did it.
Zigurd 8y ago
What if someday we get political leadership so awful that, hypothetically, a former CIA chief feels compelled to warn that is is fundamentally dangerous to the nation? One answer might be that we deserve such an outcome, and there is no reason to insulate encryption from the negative consequences. But is that a good answer?
DoctorOetker 8y ago
Personally I believe real world actions should be the focus of surveillance. The empires are simply trying to cheap out by focusing on surveillance of computer activity. This is the most profound part of Matthew Green's piece in my opinion: "While this mainly concludes my notes about on Ozzie’s proposal, I want to conclude this post with a side note, a response to something I routinely hear from folks in the law enforcement community. This is the criticism that cryptographers are a bunch of naysayers who aren’t trying to solve “one of the most fundamental problems of our time”, and are instead just rejecting the problem with lazy claims that it “can’t work”. " I believe the most fundamental problem is how can we decentralize real world security? I am FOR mass surveillance but AGAINST centralized mass surveillance. Assume every crook and cranny of the world was covered by community cameras, and the cameras encrypted the streams with treshold cryptography, such that the populace has different parts of the secret, then one needs "enough" citizens agreeing to reveal the contents seen by a specific camera at a specific time. This way its public for all or public for none. Every accident, every murder, ... Suppose a body is found, then the group decides to reveal the imagery: oh yes, in this case the person was murdered! look the perpetrator is walking out of view to the next camera, then the next,... we can trace him to where he is now. Properly trained citizens (in a now authorized police role) go and arrest the guy. He is now in prison waiting for his trial (also with community cameras, so no broomsticks in prisoner ani). At trial time, if the person denies, or claims to be a different person from the arrested one, we can trace through all the imagery from his commiting a crime to his sitting in court right there and then. So yes, there is a real conflict between cryptographers and centralized law enforcement. We dont need no spooks! And the spooks can not decode the camera imagery: a large enough number of citizens (chosen at random by cryptographic sortition) running instance of good citizen client software need to release their part of the shared secret. EDIT: So there is broadly speaking 2 kinds of crimes: * meatspace crimes (murder, negligence, rape, making childporn (automatically rape), ...) * cyber crimes (copyright, child porn, ...) I argue that not implementing such a community camera system is a form of negligence in itself. It does not adress things like copyright infringement, but ... thats not exactly the most popularly supported concept. Then there is the problem of child porn: fake and real. I argue that with deepfake any faked child porn will eventually become indiscernible from real child porn. Which leaves the problem of official child porn recorded by the community cameras used to apprehend perpetrators (since these also sign the imagery to testify authenticity!). Due too taboo many victims of child abuse didn't realize, or only had doubts that they were suffering abuse, enabling the abuse to continue. Without concrete visual examples for them to explore, to asses if they are or are not suffering child abuse, how can they alert others of their situation? We send these children extremely mixed messages: absolutely tell us if you are being abused, but absolutely never falsely report a person. Merely asking someone else for advice is automatically interpreted as a child reporting child abuse. How can a child asses his or her situation? With abstract questions using words and connotations it does not know? I believe the number of reported child abuses would go up if we used these community cameras for decentralized mass surveillance. Also for crime in general (theft, murder, ...), the knowledge that you will with extremely high probability be caught, will decrease a lot of crime. I would not be surprised if the crime rate of "impulsive" crimes (where the criminal was supposedly not able to control his urges) would drop substantially, revealing that in the current system they often get off the hook. There will still be rude people, getting fines for squeezing women in the ass while drunk. But for any actual crime in general, both victim and perpetrator would know that the victim can simply report this to the group, and that the perpetrator can not escape by lack of evidence. The current lack of evidence constantly discourages people from reporting crimes (as there is risk involved: financial: lawyers, emotional: potential incredulity at police station, ...). One might think that this will cause criminals to escalate to murder: "if you rob a victim, you should kill her, or else she will report you" but hiding a body will be very hard, and if a person goes missing the friends and relatives will report this, and instead of following the criminal we can follow the missing person from the time and place she was last reported seen! As long as cryptographers only draw the privacy card, the law enforcement community has a point. As long as the law enforcement community only draws the centralized power card, the cryptographers have a point. Only when we have decentralized mass surveillance can we have both privacy (as long as you don't commit crimes or go missing) and real law enforcement. Common FAQ: What if say a stalker repeatedly reports his ex as "missing"? Cry wolf to many times, or be blocked to report a person missing, and the good citizen client software that the citizens individually run, will refuse to comply. What if a stalker or group of them repeatedly reports a "murderer" in a celebrities bedroom? we can send a local but randomly selected properly trained (group of) citizen (in police role) to go check the room, if the supposed dead body is not there, no reason to unlock the imagery. (I will add more as people ask)
forapurpose 8y ago
I agree about the security of a centralized vault being a key weakness, but the article omits a few key aspects of Ozzie's proposal:[0] * A court order is required. It's not up to the tech vendor. * Physical control of the device is required. No remote exploits. * Access is enabled only to one device at a time. No mass hacking. The point of security is to increase the cost to the 'attacker' (here we'll use that word even for legitimate government purposes); there's no perfect security; law enforcement can access data on iPhones already. Also, attackers focus on the weakest (i.e., least expensive) link and there's limited value in increasing the cost beyond the 2nd weakest link.[1] Except for the centralization of key storage and two other issues (see below), Ozzie's proposal might increase the cost to the level of law enforcement's alternative, acquiring a hacking tool. In fact, I've been thinking of something similar (court order, physical access required, notification to user) and might even have posted it to HN at some point. Using hacking tools is much worse than Ozzie's process: There's no court (or at least it's not as enforceable, because there's no tech company checking for a warrant), no tech company, the user doesn't necessarily know their data has been accessed, remote exploits are possible, and so is mass hacking. Also remember that private citizens can still encrypt their data at the file level using other tools, though of course most will not. Here are weaknesses I see: A) The use of other means of accessing devices would have to be outlawed, or law enforcement will continue to use hacking tools and citizens gain nothing. B) Solve the centralization problem. Probably, the keys shouldn't be in the hands of the tech giants and should be distributed widely. EDIT: Perhaps require two unrelated parties for access? C) If these new access tools are built into mobile devices, what happens in countries where people's rights have been taken away? The courts are often ineffective. I suppose the fact that the phones get bricked at least informs the user, and the authorities can use hacking tools anyway, so perhaps nothing is lost. ____________ [0] https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-war-clear-encryption/ https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-war-clear-encryption/ [1] If I increase the cost of exploit A to $100,000 and exploit B costs $50,000, attackers will use B. If I increase the cost of A even further, to $200,000, it won't provide much more security - the attackers still will use B.
cesarb 8y ago
The main difference between this proposal and the previous ones is the bricking step, which is supposed to make it transparent when the key has been revealed. But once the key has been revealed, what prevents an attacker from replacing the main board of the phone (keeping the phone's exterior and its SIM card), and copying all the data to the new board? A non-technical user (and even most technical users) wouldn't know the difference.
AluminiumPoint 8y ago
I cant think of anything worse than my plastic metal and glass friend being forced to snitch against me. Its like my best friend betrayed me. Beyond creepy, key escrow proposals are the very definition of totalitarianism.
motohagiography 8y ago
The work I did on mobile encryption was framed thusly: - Deriving a key for all devices from a single key creates a single, catastrophic failure mode for the solution where all devices become vulnerable together. As soon as customers figure this out, nobody serious will adopt it because they can't afford to accept that known risk exposure. - We're assuming that the HSM we're using doesn't have a bias in its key generation RNG to limit the real key space, because if I were an intel agency, that's probably the first lever I would pull. - The entropy of the additional derivation components we can source from the individual device to locally diversify keys is really limited, and some really smart people are going to be reversing our code. Apple (and unrelated, in my own work, I never worked for anyone affiliated with them) relied on limiting number of attempts in hardware (effectively) to mitigate this risk. Personally, I think the Ozzie proposal is a red herring to give the feds rhetorical leverage by providing their side with something few people understand, but can get behind politically because it's sufficiently complex as to be "our" magic vs. "their" magic. This is to drown out technical objections and make the problem a political one where they can use their leverage. As The author (Green) notes, we can design some pretty crazy things, and if the feds came out and said, "build us a ubiquitous surveillance apparatus, or at least give us complete sovereign and executive control of all electronic information." that is technically solvable problem, but in the US, legally intractable. So instead, they want those effective powers without the overt mandate.
johnvega 8y ago
Extremely exceptional access only, in cases where thousands of people's lives could be at stake or millions. Since we can't create a fully unbreakable software/hardware security systems anyway, if ever, companies can use technology + psychology. Unintentionally create an extremely difficult to find bug that requires extremely talented engineers and large hardware resources to break, then unintentionally share it with at most discreet way probably just verbally to very few trusted 3rd parties. And it is not officially approved by the top management or even knows about it. We don't live in a perfect world and we don't have a perfect solution. JUST COMMENTS, NOT A SUGGESTION!
- akira2501 8y ago
  > Extremely exceptional access only, in cases where thousands of people's lives could be at stake or millions. And how do we determine when that's actually the case and when it's overhyped or flawed intelligence? > We don't live in a perfect world and we don't have a perfect solution. Exactly, so focusing on phone encryption is probably a waste of time.
colemannugent 8y ago
Can anyone explain why the government wouldn't just mandate that they be given all the keys from the start? Why would they put up with Apple as a middleman who could potentially refuse their requests? Also, this key escrow scheme is near impossible to scale to more than one government. Now we need a way to authenticate government agents, good luck with that.
- allenz 8y ago
  The government would be a single point of failure so it's cheaper and more secure to privatize. Also, private control of keys acts as a check upon government abuse.
irq-1 8y ago
Bricking the phone works against law enforcement by only allowing raw access to the data. Even if Clear worked correctly, law enforcement couldn't open apps and see the data in the correct context. They'd have raw data files full of indexes, hashes, and cached data. Worse, apps would start to encrypt data on the client specifically to avoid Clear. The only significant change between plain key escrow and Clear (bricking the phone) would defeat the usefulness of Clear.
- allenz 8y ago
  Apps could potentially work in read-only mode. Plus it's pretty easy to design a tool to pretty print iMessages given raw data, and that alone would be very useful for law enforcement.
rozzie 8y ago
If you'd like to look at the proposal yourself rather than to interpret it through others: https://github.com/rayozzie/clear/blob/master/clear-rozzie.pdf https://github.com/rayozzie/clear/blob/master/clear-rozzie.p...
valiant-comma 8y ago
Just a nitpick. Matthew Green uses the analogy of signing keys being leaked often as evidence that Ozzi’s proposed system would be similarly not secure. This is a weak analogy: signing private keys are often leaked because their use case requires them to be “online” in some fashion (code must be signed with the private key so it can be verified with the public key). Similarly, CAs must use private keys operationally (to sign customer CSRs), increasing the risk of key compromise. In Ozzi’s proposal, the private key never actually has to exist outside the environment it was created in, only the public key does. As pointed out in other comments, LE would not need access to the private key, either, they could simply submit the encrypted passcode to the manufacturer, who would then decrypt it on their behalf using the private key.
- allenz 8y ago
  Code signing and decryption both require access to the private key, possibly through a hardware security module. I don't see why decryption has less exposure.
ggm 8y ago
I don't want this scheme. I don't want key escrow. But, a critique in the document is a 'if lost, lost forever' moment. If the escrow DB is compromised, the article says all phone are now pwned. For that point in time, true. But phones are online devices. why does the escrow key have to be a constant, which if the central store is compromised means all phones prior to that date are compromised forever? eg, re=spin the per-phone keygen on some cycle, and you define a window of risk, but it passes. re-spin clearly has to pass through some protocol, but we've been doing ephemeral re-key forever with websites.

104 points by Hagelin 8y ago

throwaway84742 8y ago

But why? Why give the government such a ripe target for abuse? Why tilt the balance of power even further in its favor?

SolarNet 8y ago
Also a good question, but this post focused only on why it's a stupid idea technically on purpose.
- throwaway84742 8y ago
  Point taken. He briefly talks about “policy” in the beginning. Policy is the instrument through which the ruling class gradually strips away individual freedoms. We need to prominently feature freedom in these conversations, because ultimately that’s what at stake here.
amelius 8y ago
Because now there is a patent, the government can start forcing companies to implement it. And the patent owner will profit. Quite smart, actually.
- numbsafari 8y ago
  Except prior art? I mean, clearly there’s a difference between “blows up” and “destroys all the key material”, but clearly Apple can point to prior art here.
nine_k 8y ago
Because every organization strives for more power, whether its members admit it or not. The very idea of "checks and balances" is that different organizations would strive for power on opposite directions, thus preventing each other from gaining much.
allenz 8y ago
Many people, especially those outside the tech community, do not view law enforcement as an adversary. In the US, the balance that we have struck is that the government cannot search our property, except upon probable cause (fourth amendment). While I personally don't like it, I think that warrant-based key escrow is reasonable from a policy perspective.
- throwaway84742 8y ago
  In post-FISA world where a campaign of a presidential candidate was wiretapped under false pretenses, this view of the world is criminally naive.

shakna 8y ago

> It literally refers to a giant, ultra-secure vault that will have to be maintained individually by different phone manufacturers We can't even trust manufacturers to provide updates in most cases. Placing that much trust in them is nothing short of lunacy.

IAmEveryone 8y ago

CAs seem to be able to keep their private keys safe. Why should phone companies be less competent? They certainly have far more money to devote to it. In any case, Ozzie’s proposal shows that the technological argument has always been more of an attempt to circumvent the political discussion. The tech community loves the idea of subverting the law with technology when it doesn’t suit them. The Federal,Reserve is just a private bank run by Jews to enslave America? Bitcoin! I wanna trade drugs and child porn? Tor! (And bitcoin). That dynamic is undemocratic. Whatever you may think about the US government, it is still far more legitimate to make these decisions than some guy in a basement and the CXOs of Google and Facebook. Moving the center of power from the public sphere to mighty techno-wizards may seem appealing as long as you can culturally identify with them. But if it comes to pass, it will be Comcast and Lockheed Martin that control the networks, not you and me.

mtgx 8y ago
Robert Graham had a rebuttal, too, and he mentions how Let's Encrypt for instance is quite vulnerable to sophisticated attackers employing DNS spoofing attacks against it: https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/04/no-ray-ozzie-hasnt-solved-crypto.html https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/04/no-ray-ozzie-hasnt-solved... Also, I think most would agree that CAs are quite terrible at security. It's part of the reason why everyone thinks the CA system sucks and is not trustworthy and it's also why Google has been pushing for Certificate Transparency to be able to verify if the CAs (or people hacking the CAs) are misbehaving. But it's still a patch on a broken system. And look what's been happening with Symantec, too, the largest CA. They were terrible at managing the infrastructure in a secure manner. There are thousands of different CAs. Most are probably insecure or hacked, we just haven't learned about it yet. Also, if you read Green's post, he mentions how this wouldn't be like the CA/software signing system at all. In those systems, you can revoke the certificate. If someone gets the master key for 500 million iPhones, those phones will either need to be bricked or they will remain vulnerable forever. If the NSA/FBI would learn that the system was compromised, they'd never tell us about it either, because they'd know people would then be pushing for the removal of the system, and they wouldn't want that after fighting for so long for something like it. I think Ozzie is being very irresponsible pushing for this. And the reason he is being this irresponsible is because he has a patent on it (Green links to it in the post), so he'd get royalty for billions and billions of phones for the next 20 years if implemented. That's really his main goal here. Ozzie wants all the credit and money for it, but I bet he's not going to take any liability for when the system is inevitably broken.

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FascinatedBox 8y ago

> Also, when a phone is unlocked with Clear, a special chip inside the phone blows itself up. no thanks

pdpi 8y ago
Assuming “blows itself up” means it’s bricked rather than “does a Samsung”, I’m ok with that. As the article explains, it’s the only form of intrusion detection in the whole thing

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weinzierl 8y ago

> [..] and keep the secret key in a “vault” where hopefully it will never be needed. That's only in bullet point one and where it already falls apart.

prepend 8y ago

I’m not sure the benefit to Apple or other phone manufacturers. This looks like a substantial cost with zero benefit to those others than law enforcement. And substantial new risk for misuse or abuse. What’s Ozzie’s true motivation? Is he looking to start a company running Clear and raking in patent revenue? I get why the governments want this, but not why a citizen would propose this. If it weren’t Ray Ozzie, I would think this was just part of some propaganda push.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Money. His true motivation is money. Secondary to that is prestige; he "solved" this problem.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Do you personally know him or is this just speculation ? Because most entrepreneurs aren't running businesses primarily for the money.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  You might be right, but you’re guessing. I’m pretty pro-crypto. I’m an anarchist. I am generally oriented towards non-governmental solutions to everything, including violence. But even me, even with that bias, I still worry quite often about what evil can lurk behind cryptographic structures, and what effect wide availability of strong crypto will have on that. I don’t know that it will be positive or negative... my gut says positive, but I worry. And so it’s not crazy to me to think Ozzie might be legitimately worried about people’s safety.
jakelazaroff 8y ago
> I’m not sure the benefit to Apple or other phone manufacturers. This looks like a substantial cost with zero benefit to those others than law enforcement. The benefit is that law enforcement has access to relevant information. Society has a vested interest in this provided it doesn't infringe any other rights. It's why warrants exist. If you have the ability to respect a warrant without hurting your customers, it should be illegal not to do so. Obviously there are significant technical issues, which is why this is contentious; those are outside the scope of this comment.

DoctorOetker 8y ago

I don't see anything new in the alleged proposal, this is the same old crypto war. This is "just" key escrow. One might as well propose to have the manufacturers build in the governments public key (and autobrick phone usage) such that the phone can detect if it is really the government reading the phone. Another note: "Ozzie’s proposal relies fundamentally on the ability of manufacturers to secure massive amounts of extremely valuable key material against the strongest and most resourceful attackers on the planet. " This is not true: the phone encrypts the users passcode against the manufacturers public key. If the government tries to read the phone, it will get the encrypted passcode (useless) and send it to the manufacturer who decrypts the passcode. A single private key is not massive amounts of information. Not that it changes anything about protection needs: wheither its a piece of paper containing the say 4096 bits (512 bytes), or in Matthew Greens misinterpretation billions of 512 bytes (half a terrabyte) on a single HDD, they both have the same value. The whole code base needs similar protection anyway: their bootloaders already are signed by the manufacturer. All this centralization is bad, leave the crypto genie out of the bottle please...

kurthr 8y ago
I do prefer the idea of storing it on paper... at least it's a little easier to lock up. Even a big camera will only take a few thousand pictures before it fills up, and physical access is a lot easier to enforce. If we make 2 billion phones a year (Apple itself is just over 200M) and you have a line printer running full blast (66 lines = 1page per sec) you could do Apple with one printer... and the world in 10. It would be a lot of boxes of paper though... about a box an hour. edit: to be clear I was assuming that almost every dot in the matrix was a valid bit and there were 66 keys per page... 80 or even 132 columns at 7x5 wouldn't be enough for 4096 bits otherwise.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  impressive calculation for the per phone case! but as I wrote, its not necessary in Ozzie's scheme: Apple only needs to store the single private key. All the phones contain the same public key corresponding to it. All phones encrypt the user passcode to the same public key. When a user tries to unlock his own phone with his correct passcode, the phone encrypts his passcode and arrives at thee same encrypted key, unlocking the phone. When the government seizes the phone, with a special device they have the phone show the encrypted pass code, dump the encrypted GB's of encrypted phone contents, and burn an irreversible efuse in the processor disabling it. They send the encrypted passcode to Apple, who verifies its the government indeed. Apple uses its single private key to decrypt the user passcode. Apple sends this pass code to the government. The government can decrypt the image. In the proposal there is no need for a massive database of key material. It's nonsense. (in practice Apple would use treshold crypography, so that at least k out of n private keys each belonging to specially trained and screened employees are necessary to decrypt) (in practice each phone has a hardcoded random nonce in efuses and instead of encrypting the user passcode, it encrypts [passcode+nonce], otherwise the government could just bruteforce 10^4 encryptions to the public key) I am only saying that this can be done efficiently, not saying that I agree with the desirability of key escrow. This idea of key escrow is as old as cryptography.

OliverJones 8y ago

We need a new way of thinking about caches of secrets. It comes from this unpleasant truth: all secrets eventually leak. The evidence of the past few years teaches us that even state actors with unlimited resources cannot prevent their secrets from leaking. A "leak" here happens when a trusted entity loses control of the secret to one or more untrusted and malicious entities. That's just a definition, not a claim that any particular government, company, or person is a trusted entity. To counter this, we need multiple layers of defense. One is the business of bricking the phones when the leaked secrets are exploited. That makes it plain that the secret has leaked. It's a valuable layer of defense. Another is to make the secrets have limited useful lifetimes. Expiration and revocation for TLS certificates is a way to do that. Credit/debit card numbers can be deactivated and replaced rapidly. That's another way to limit the lifetime of a secret. Ozzie's proposal does not include a way to limit secrets' lifetimes. (Social Security numbers are problematic secrets: they too have unlimited lifetimes.) A third layer is making the secrets have limited utility. If debit cards had daily spending limits, their secret numbers would be less useful than they are today, for example. Day-one exploits are secrets with vast utility, for another example. Ozzie proposes a secret to unlock an entire phone. How about limiting that to, say, the phone's call log or SMS log? A fourth layer is to keep the caches of secrets as small as possible, so a breach affects as few people as possible. Ozzie proposes the opposite of this. A fifth layer: holders of caches of secrets must know they are strictly liable for breaches proportional to the damage they do. It must not matter whether the breach was due to negligence, carelessness, espionage, or salt water rusting out the safe after a storm. Large scale key escrow cache systems will never be able to meet this standard: nation states won't honor that liability, nor will they pay private companies enough to cover the insurance for it. (Strict liability is not unprecedented: workers' compensation and the vaccine injury victims' compensation fund are two reasonably successful examples.) People, companies, and governments holding secrets necessarily must consider what happens when (not if) they leak, and provide at least some defenses in depth like these. Ozzie's proposal has weak and incomplete in-depth defenses. That's why it's dangerous.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
What if the proposal is changed so that the keys do not need to be kept forever? What if Apple is allowed (or even required) to publicize the private key(s) after, say, 10 years?

tosser00005 8y ago

He talks about “massive amounts of extremely valuable key material“ needed to be stored for billions of devices. It’s not like this would be Fort Knox. All that data could be stored on a couple of USB sticks which, really, makes it even scarier. Someone could hold the entire contents in the palm of their hand walk away with everything.

kardos 8y ago
The article makes exactly that point: > If ever a single attacker gains access to that vault and is able to extract, at most, a few gigabytes of data (around the size of an iTunes movie), then the attackers will gain unencrypted access to every device in the world. Even better: if the attackers can do this surreptitiously, you’ll never know they did it.

Zigurd 8y ago

What if someday we get political leadership so awful that, hypothetically, a former CIA chief feels compelled to warn that is is fundamentally dangerous to the nation? One answer might be that we deserve such an outcome, and there is no reason to insulate encryption from the negative consequences. But is that a good answer?

DoctorOetker 8y ago

Personally I believe real world actions should be the focus of surveillance. The empires are simply trying to cheap out by focusing on surveillance of computer activity. This is the most profound part of Matthew Green's piece in my opinion: "While this mainly concludes my notes about on Ozzie’s proposal, I want to conclude this post with a side note, a response to something I routinely hear from folks in the law enforcement community. This is the criticism that cryptographers are a bunch of naysayers who aren’t trying to solve “one of the most fundamental problems of our time”, and are instead just rejecting the problem with lazy claims that it “can’t work”. " I believe the most fundamental problem is how can we decentralize real world security? I am FOR mass surveillance but AGAINST centralized mass surveillance. Assume every crook and cranny of the world was covered by community cameras, and the cameras encrypted the streams with treshold cryptography, such that the populace has different parts of the secret, then one needs "enough" citizens agreeing to reveal the contents seen by a specific camera at a specific time. This way its public for all or public for none. Every accident, every murder, ... Suppose a body is found, then the group decides to reveal the imagery: oh yes, in this case the person was murdered! look the perpetrator is walking out of view to the next camera, then the next,... we can trace him to where he is now. Properly trained citizens (in a now authorized police role) go and arrest the guy. He is now in prison waiting for his trial (also with community cameras, so no broomsticks in prisoner ani). At trial time, if the person denies, or claims to be a different person from the arrested one, we can trace through all the imagery from his commiting a crime to his sitting in court right there and then. So yes, there is a real conflict between cryptographers and centralized law enforcement. We dont need no spooks! And the spooks can not decode the camera imagery: a large enough number of citizens (chosen at random by cryptographic sortition) running instance of good citizen client software need to release their part of the shared secret. EDIT: So there is broadly speaking 2 kinds of crimes: * meatspace crimes (murder, negligence, rape, making childporn (automatically rape), ...) * cyber crimes (copyright, child porn, ...) I argue that not implementing such a community camera system is a form of negligence in itself. It does not adress things like copyright infringement, but ... thats not exactly the most popularly supported concept. Then there is the problem of child porn: fake and real. I argue that with deepfake any faked child porn will eventually become indiscernible from real child porn. Which leaves the problem of official child porn recorded by the community cameras used to apprehend perpetrators (since these also sign the imagery to testify authenticity!). Due too taboo many victims of child abuse didn't realize, or only had doubts that they were suffering abuse, enabling the abuse to continue. Without concrete visual examples for them to explore, to asses if they are or are not suffering child abuse, how can they alert others of their situation? We send these children extremely mixed messages: absolutely tell us if you are being abused, but absolutely never falsely report a person. Merely asking someone else for advice is automatically interpreted as a child reporting child abuse. How can a child asses his or her situation? With abstract questions using words and connotations it does not know? I believe the number of reported child abuses would go up if we used these community cameras for decentralized mass surveillance. Also for crime in general (theft, murder, ...), the knowledge that you will with extremely high probability be caught, will decrease a lot of crime. I would not be surprised if the crime rate of "impulsive" crimes (where the criminal was supposedly not able to control his urges) would drop substantially, revealing that in the current system they often get off the hook. There will still be rude people, getting fines for squeezing women in the ass while drunk. But for any actual crime in general, both victim and perpetrator would know that the victim can simply report this to the group, and that the perpetrator can not escape by lack of evidence. The current lack of evidence constantly discourages people from reporting crimes (as there is risk involved: financial: lawyers, emotional: potential incredulity at police station, ...). One might think that this will cause criminals to escalate to murder: "if you rob a victim, you should kill her, or else she will report you" but hiding a body will be very hard, and if a person goes missing the friends and relatives will report this, and instead of following the criminal we can follow the missing person from the time and place she was last reported seen! As long as cryptographers only draw the privacy card, the law enforcement community has a point. As long as the law enforcement community only draws the centralized power card, the cryptographers have a point. Only when we have decentralized mass surveillance can we have both privacy (as long as you don't commit crimes or go missing) and real law enforcement. Common FAQ: What if say a stalker repeatedly reports his ex as "missing"? Cry wolf to many times, or be blocked to report a person missing, and the good citizen client software that the citizens individually run, will refuse to comply. What if a stalker or group of them repeatedly reports a "murderer" in a celebrities bedroom? we can send a local but randomly selected properly trained (group of) citizen (in police role) to go check the room, if the supposed dead body is not there, no reason to unlock the imagery. (I will add more as people ask)

forapurpose 8y ago

I agree about the security of a centralized vault being a key weakness, but the article omits a few key aspects of Ozzie's proposal:[0] * A court order is required. It's not up to the tech vendor. * Physical control of the device is required. No remote exploits. * Access is enabled only to one device at a time. No mass hacking. The point of security is to increase the cost to the 'attacker' (here we'll use that word even for legitimate government purposes); there's no perfect security; law enforcement can access data on iPhones already. Also, attackers focus on the weakest (i.e., least expensive) link and there's limited value in increasing the cost beyond the 2nd weakest link.[1] Except for the centralization of key storage and two other issues (see below), Ozzie's proposal might increase the cost to the level of law enforcement's alternative, acquiring a hacking tool. In fact, I've been thinking of something similar (court order, physical access required, notification to user) and might even have posted it to HN at some point. Using hacking tools is much worse than Ozzie's process: There's no court (or at least it's not as enforceable, because there's no tech company checking for a warrant), no tech company, the user doesn't necessarily know their data has been accessed, remote exploits are possible, and so is mass hacking. Also remember that private citizens can still encrypt their data at the file level using other tools, though of course most will not. Here are weaknesses I see: A) The use of other means of accessing devices would have to be outlawed, or law enforcement will continue to use hacking tools and citizens gain nothing. B) Solve the centralization problem. Probably, the keys shouldn't be in the hands of the tech giants and should be distributed widely. EDIT: Perhaps require two unrelated parties for access? C) If these new access tools are built into mobile devices, what happens in countries where people's rights have been taken away? The courts are often ineffective. I suppose the fact that the phones get bricked at least informs the user, and the authorities can use hacking tools anyway, so perhaps nothing is lost. ____________ [0] https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-war-clear-encryption/ https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-war-clear-encryption/ [1] If I increase the cost of exploit A to $100,000 and exploit B costs $50,000, attackers will use B. If I increase the cost of A even further, to $200,000, it won't provide much more security - the attackers still will use B.

cesarb 8y ago

The main difference between this proposal and the previous ones is the bricking step, which is supposed to make it transparent when the key has been revealed. But once the key has been revealed, what prevents an attacker from replacing the main board of the phone (keeping the phone's exterior and its SIM card), and copying all the data to the new board? A non-technical user (and even most technical users) wouldn't know the difference.

AluminiumPoint 8y ago

I cant think of anything worse than my plastic metal and glass friend being forced to snitch against me. Its like my best friend betrayed me. Beyond creepy, key escrow proposals are the very definition of totalitarianism.

motohagiography 8y ago

The work I did on mobile encryption was framed thusly: - Deriving a key for all devices from a single key creates a single, catastrophic failure mode for the solution where all devices become vulnerable together. As soon as customers figure this out, nobody serious will adopt it because they can't afford to accept that known risk exposure. - We're assuming that the HSM we're using doesn't have a bias in its key generation RNG to limit the real key space, because if I were an intel agency, that's probably the first lever I would pull. - The entropy of the additional derivation components we can source from the individual device to locally diversify keys is really limited, and some really smart people are going to be reversing our code. Apple (and unrelated, in my own work, I never worked for anyone affiliated with them) relied on limiting number of attempts in hardware (effectively) to mitigate this risk. Personally, I think the Ozzie proposal is a red herring to give the feds rhetorical leverage by providing their side with something few people understand, but can get behind politically because it's sufficiently complex as to be "our" magic vs. "their" magic. This is to drown out technical objections and make the problem a political one where they can use their leverage. As The author (Green) notes, we can design some pretty crazy things, and if the feds came out and said, "build us a ubiquitous surveillance apparatus, or at least give us complete sovereign and executive control of all electronic information." that is technically solvable problem, but in the US, legally intractable. So instead, they want those effective powers without the overt mandate.

johnvega 8y ago

Extremely exceptional access only, in cases where thousands of people's lives could be at stake or millions. Since we can't create a fully unbreakable software/hardware security systems anyway, if ever, companies can use technology + psychology. Unintentionally create an extremely difficult to find bug that requires extremely talented engineers and large hardware resources to break, then unintentionally share it with at most discreet way probably just verbally to very few trusted 3rd parties. And it is not officially approved by the top management or even knows about it. We don't live in a perfect world and we don't have a perfect solution. JUST COMMENTS, NOT A SUGGESTION!

akira2501 8y ago
> Extremely exceptional access only, in cases where thousands of people's lives could be at stake or millions. And how do we determine when that's actually the case and when it's overhyped or flawed intelligence? > We don't live in a perfect world and we don't have a perfect solution. Exactly, so focusing on phone encryption is probably a waste of time.

colemannugent 8y ago

Can anyone explain why the government wouldn't just mandate that they be given all the keys from the start? Why would they put up with Apple as a middleman who could potentially refuse their requests? Also, this key escrow scheme is near impossible to scale to more than one government. Now we need a way to authenticate government agents, good luck with that.

allenz 8y ago
The government would be a single point of failure so it's cheaper and more secure to privatize. Also, private control of keys acts as a check upon government abuse.

irq-1 8y ago

Bricking the phone works against law enforcement by only allowing raw access to the data. Even if Clear worked correctly, law enforcement couldn't open apps and see the data in the correct context. They'd have raw data files full of indexes, hashes, and cached data. Worse, apps would start to encrypt data on the client specifically to avoid Clear. The only significant change between plain key escrow and Clear (bricking the phone) would defeat the usefulness of Clear.

allenz 8y ago
Apps could potentially work in read-only mode. Plus it's pretty easy to design a tool to pretty print iMessages given raw data, and that alone would be very useful for law enforcement.

rozzie 8y ago

If you'd like to look at the proposal yourself rather than to interpret it through others: https://github.com/rayozzie/clear/blob/master/clear-rozzie.pdf https://github.com/rayozzie/clear/blob/master/clear-rozzie.p...

valiant-comma 8y ago

Just a nitpick. Matthew Green uses the analogy of signing keys being leaked often as evidence that Ozzi’s proposed system would be similarly not secure. This is a weak analogy: signing private keys are often leaked because their use case requires them to be “online” in some fashion (code must be signed with the private key so it can be verified with the public key). Similarly, CAs must use private keys operationally (to sign customer CSRs), increasing the risk of key compromise. In Ozzi’s proposal, the private key never actually has to exist outside the environment it was created in, only the public key does. As pointed out in other comments, LE would not need access to the private key, either, they could simply submit the encrypted passcode to the manufacturer, who would then decrypt it on their behalf using the private key.

allenz 8y ago
Code signing and decryption both require access to the private key, possibly through a hardware security module. I don't see why decryption has less exposure.

ggm 8y ago

I don't want this scheme. I don't want key escrow. But, a critique in the document is a 'if lost, lost forever' moment. If the escrow DB is compromised, the article says all phone are now pwned. For that point in time, true. But phones are online devices. why does the escrow key have to be a constant, which if the central store is compromised means all phones prior to that date are compromised forever? eg, re=spin the per-phone keygen on some cycle, and you define a window of risk, but it passes. re-spin clearly has to pass through some protocol, but we've been doing ephemeral re-key forever with websites.