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Zoom’s 90-day plan to bolster key privacy and security initiatives
- k33n 6y agoSo were they really sending data to servers in China? From what little I've heard and read about this, that is what stood out to me. Not sure they should ever be trusted again after that.
- pwarner 6y agoI think this is the Zoom response to that one: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/03/response-to-research-from-university-of-torontos-citizen-lab/ https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/03/response-to-resear... As I read it they accidentally routed some data to China based servers for a month (Feb 2020) due to a config mess up during their crazy fast scaling period. This is since fixed.
- nodesocket 6y agoI find this a little to convenient of an explanation and with the founder and CEO being Chinese. "Accidentally" routing requests to China is something that should have been spotted easily by monitoring and logging. Request latency should have spiked.
- hyko 6y agoThey were making requests to IPs in China long before Feb 2020. At the time I assumed they’d been hacked, but in retrospect it seems like this was just how their organisation is distributed. Needless to say, I have decided not to endorse their videoconferencing solution.
- otterley 6y agoDo you have evidence of this?
- ufmace 6y agoI'm inclined to believe that for now. Though I fully expect that a bunch of security researchers will be taking a very close look indeed at exactly what data is still going to or through China. I am open to changing my mind upon seeing evidence that, after being informed of the problem and promising to correct it, they failed to resolve the issue and continue to send data to any country it doesn't need to go to.
- dehrmann 6y agoSerious hypothetical question: suppose you're able to capture all Zoom calls. If you're a foreign government, how do you scale the analysis, and what can you generally do with the information? It'd be hard to get a useful amount of trade secrets or know-how. You'll see partial schematics and design docs, but without much context. At the executive level, you could at least scale the analysis to have actual people monitoring the calls. You could get broad strategy (e.g. launch a mid-range 5G phone in 2021 Q1) and enough financial information to make some well-informed trades.
- catalogia 6y agoHard drives are pretty cheap, particularly for a government. Store it all now, target your analysis narrowly later at your leisure.
- sprinfo 6y agoDo you know how much data that would have to be? Scaling that seems improbable.
- cyphar 6y agoThe NSA has built a data center in Utah specifically for this problem[1], so it's hardly beyond the realm of plausibility. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- dehrmann 6y agoYear-old data isn't worth very much.
- catalogia 6y agoThere's no reason to think they'd have to wait a year. High value targets, like SpaceX had they not banned the use of Zoom, would obviously receive priority treatment by the Chinese intelligence community. My point here is that the analysis doesn't need to be done in real time, they could store the data and review it a few hours later, or whenever they wanted. (For that matter, there is certainly a lot of data that would be useful a year later. Some data could be valuable even many years later. Taking SpaceX as an example, it should be obvious that old data could be valuable.)
- TheChaplain 6y agouh, is that an outlook-email link with someone's username in? The one linking to Alex.
- technicaldonut 6y agoYup. Looks to be their email address. Email is from PR firm Sard Verbinnen & Co.
- basch 6y agoSafelinks have the email address of the recipient of a link.
- arkadiyt 6y agoProbably someone internally emailed Alex's Stanford profile to their blog content writer - the sender had email tracking enabled and the writer blindly copied the link.
- cobookman 6y agoTo be fair, Alex's public profile includes a link to his email: https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/people/alex-stamos-0 https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/people/alex-stamos-0
- throwaway15392 6y agoThey’re in the same bed as China. I don’t trust them for anything now, this to me is just a PR management exercise. They’re still going to give away your data
- izacus 6y agoChina, the best bogeyman to discredit anyone you don't like. Is that the 2020s version of a "commie"?
- tw04 6y agoAre you suggesting that China isn't responsible for repeated, massive state-sponsored hacks? That they aren't actively committing industrial espionage primarily through said state-sponsored hacking? If you're not saying that, then why are you pretending the fact that Zoom is sending keys THROUGH CHINA and developing the product IN CHINA is not a big deal?
- x0x0 6y agoIt's the industrial espionage angle that is probably more concerning. The Chinese government certainly can get attendee lists and keys for Zoom meetings; want to listen to meetings the cxx folks are in? Or worse, steal prospects for domestic companies? I'd be pretty enthused about getting the list of people my competitors are doing sales calls with.
- izacus 6y ago> Are you suggesting that China isn't responsible for repeated, massive state-sponsored hacks? That they aren't actively committing industrial espionage primarily through said state-sponsored hacking? Nope, not at all. They're guilty of all of it and probably more. > If you're not saying that, then why are you pretending the fact that Zoom is sending keys THROUGH CHINA and developing the product IN CHINA is not a big deal? Because for me, as an European, it doesn't really make much difference does it? Both countries are currently led by lying dishonest governments which are spying on anything and everything that moves. If anything, it disappoints me that Americans are wasting so much time complaining about China while the worst parts of the Chinese regime are growing and thriving on their own backyard and affecting their own wellbeing.
- rshnotsecure 6y agoI showed Alex Stamos information two days ago that Zoom engineers had surreptitiously spied on women around the world and then assembled their webcams into a single dashboard for Zoom engineers to view. The name of this dashboard was p*ssy4all.dashboard-production.ipa.zoom.us. A quick way to prove this is to type this subdomain into securitytrails.com. It lists a dozen different IP addresses this internal product had for several months between September and November of 2019. LINK: https://securitytrails.com/domain/pussy4all.dashboard-production.ipa.zoom.us/history/a https://securitytrails.com/domain/pussy4all.dashboard-produc...
- londons_explore 6y agoI don't see anything for that domain...
- catalogia 6y agoI do, in that link provided in an edit, after getting around google recaptcha (wow securitytrails.com has a shitty website...) Edit: here's a screenshot: https://twitter.com/danehrlich11/status/1247206209876353025/photo/1 https://twitter.com/danehrlich11/status/1247206209876353025/...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- x0x0 6y agoCan you link? I couldn't find that on securitytrails
- rshnotsecure 6y agohttps://securitytrails.com/domain/pussy4all.dashboard-production.ipa.zoom.us/history/a https://securitytrails.com/domain/pussy4all.dashboard-produc...
- tachion 6y ago
- londons_explore 6y ago"90 day plans" tend to be management & PR things... Real engineering is more of a "it takes as long as the job takes"...
- wuunderbar 6y agoCan you blame them? Most users and purchasers (at a lot of companies the people making purchase decisions aren't actually the users) don't really understand or care about how long real engineering takes. As long as they made a decision to pick a vendor based based on the principles of Cover Your Ass it's all that matters. It's another primary reason why so many "enterprise" companies purchase Redhat over running CentOS.
- tommoor 6y agoYep, entire post is pure marketing signaling and nothing in the way of details.
- DevX101 6y agoEric Yuan is the real deal. He's an engineer and is taking this seriously. This isn't marketing spin.
- jimbob45 6y agoZoom won the proverbial lottery with this pandemic and lost their ticket through greed/laziness. Great companies are always prepared when their big break comes. Zoom is not a great company.
- DenisM 6y agoI'm still not sure what to think of the whole debacle. Zoom could be a victim of the internet mob justice, where every inevitable misstep is blown out of proportion. Perhaps the mob is helped along by some competing interests. Or Zoom could be yet another tech company with dubious ethics (like U: or F). I doubt they are outright a PLA branch, that would be far too obvious. This isn't just idle musings - I love how Zoom allows me to share screen/whiteboard, and see people's faces at the same time. It works really well for remote dev collaboration, in some ways better than physical presence. And yet the question of safety remains. Should I go and research WebEx?
- lacker 6y agoOccam’s Razor. Zoom usage went up by 8x in a few months. Usually doubling in two years is great for a public company. So that’s 6 years of great growth, compressed into a few months. It shouldn’t be surprising to see six years of security problems also compressed into those three months. I think Zoom is on track to fix these problems quickly and cement their spot as the best solution for videoconferencing.
- ergothus 6y agoZoom had the same security issues with half the traffic. Acting like usage causes them is disingenuous. Technically speaking, zoom has shown off great and remarkably stable/scalable features. But that is orthogonal to whether they are putting people at risk (e.g. not-so-secret therapy sessions) or lying about their feature set (clearly claiming to have end to end encryption).
- dangus 6y agoDevil's advocate, I guess: 8 times the users, 8 times (at least) the number of people to notice those problems. Especially when work from home is now at the center of our conversation, and journalistic outlets shift their attention to newly-popular services like Zoom and Houseparty. Regarding your last example, I'm also continually confused at the claim that Zoom has been lying about end-to-end encryption. I don't see any place where they ever claimed to encrypt anything end-to-end except for chats, and only after enabling the feature: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207599823-End-To-End-Encryption-for-Chat https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207599823-End-To-E... https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362723-Encryption-for-Meetings https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362723-Encrypti... When I'm in a Zoom meeting, it says that my connection is encrypted (the green E lock thing). It does not say "end-to-end." So I always assumed that just meant that the transport layer is encrypted.
- yalooze 6y agoI can only assume CISO is Chief Information Security Officer? I hadn't seen the acronym before. Bad Zoom for not writing it out in full on the first instance.
- munchbunny 6y ago"CISO" is a pretty standard acronym. People who don't work in cybersecurity or who don't have that background might not recognize it, but it seems like a minor detail.
- yalooze 6y agoSure, it's a minor detail. And yes, you can say the audience for this post are people who work in cybersecurity. But it costs nothing to introduce the acronym, as is usually recommended. Without it you are alienating anyone who doesn't know the term.
- socalnate1 6y agoSerious question - would you feel the same way about using CEO or CFO without spelling out what they stand for?
- downerending 6y agoI only first encountered it a year or two ago. It's pretty difficult to keep up with management/marketing buzzwords. In any case, anyone at the 'C' level almost by definition knows little or nothing about actual computer security.
- makerofspoons 6y agoZoom's web SDK and web client were down for nearly four days over the weekend with minimal communication, and when they brought it all back they killed a key functionality the education market needs which is the ability to join a meeting without an account: https://devforum.zoom.us/t/in-progress-web-sdk-web-client-from-browser-403-forbidden/10782/35 https://devforum.zoom.us/t/in-progress-web-sdk-web-client-fr...
- criddell 6y agoWhy is the need for an account a showstopper?
- makerofspoons 6y agoMany students aren't old enough to create their own accounts and getting parents to create accounts and provide credentials is a bureaucratic mess for the schools I volunteer with.
- criddell 6y agoThe school needs an education account and students should be able to join meetings hosted through a school account: > Students under the age of 18 should not go to www.zoom.us to create an account because (i) they should only be joining Zoom meeting sessions as participants (not separate account holders) through the School Subscriber’s account and (ii) minors are not permitted to create an account per Zoom’s Terms of Service. The School Subscriber’s account administrator (e.g., teachers) should securely and confidentially provide meeting information and meeting passwords to the student users to ensure the school can maintain supervision and control over its student users’ meeting experiences. If students have already signed up for individual accounts, Zoom can assist schools in fixing this. The school should contact their account rep about this. I bet they can fix it quickly.
- flippyhead 6y agoActually this isn't true anymore, they have since added the _option_ to not require an account when using the web client. The Web SDK still works like before and also doesn't require an account. But I agree, the way it was handled was harrowing.
- Justsignedup 6y agoand this is why product over security always wins. there's mob mentality right now, but zoom got a TON of customers, and now is gonna have proof of end-to-end encryption in a couple of months. boom. zoom wins. honestly just don't talk on zoom about something highly secretive such as ... idk... something a government is interested in as that isn't currently secure, other than that, don't sweat it.
- larkost 6y agoThey are very unlikely to have end-to-end security in a couple of months, for the same reason few (if any) of their competitors have it: it is really bandwidth intensive to send full-resolution video of every participant to every other participant. So everyone sends low-res for most participants, and at most one high-resolution stream. To do this you have to be able to make low-resolution streams out of the high-resolution one people are sending you (to pass along to others). That means you have to terminate encryption on the server side. Once you have done that you are no longer "end-to-end". This is just the state of things. This is a valid tradeoff for most things, but the real problem here is that Zoom claimed (and continues to claim) "end-to-end encryption", while not providing it. That is a lie, and people naturally wonder what else you are lying about.
- viraptor 6y agoYou can also send two streams (high and low quality) from each client and make other clients request the right one from the server. Yes, it's slightly more bandwidth than before and now complexity. No, it doesn't require full mesh of connections to be E2E.
- upofadown 6y agoThere is some evidence that they have a form of useless end to end encryption now. Since hardly anyone knows what the prerequisites are for useful e2ee they can probably make the announcement whenever they want.
- sandov 6y agoAnd don't install the Zoom app on a computer where you store secretive data, such as medical information, private keys, passwords, credit card data or anything that you don't want the government or cyber-criminals to know. Doesn't sound as easy now.
- teknologist 6y agoI can't quite figure out what's going on with this thread. It seems to have an eerie amount of posts about support for Zoom, perhaps by paid trolls ("wumaos")?
- dang 6y agoPlease don't break the site guidelines by posting insinuations of astroturfing. Overwhelmingly, such perceptions are simply in the eye of the beholder. I say that based on many years of looking at that data, and you can find more explanations here than anyone would ever want to read: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you're worried about this kind of thing, follow the site guidelines and email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. (We always do.) In this case, though, the simplest explanation seems adequate: the community is divided. When there's a popular divisive topic, people who feel strongly for side A always feel like the amount of support for opposing side B is 'eerie', because it's hard to imagine how it could possibly be in good faith. Of course B feels the same way about A. Edit: oh dear. It seems like you've been using HN mostly for nationalistic battle lately. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop. It's emphatically not what this site is for, regardless of which nations are at issue.
- tmaly 6y agoMy company banned the use of Zoom on company computers or computer connecting to the company network. Has anyone else had this happen to them?
- ssully 6y agoNo one I know has had it happen yet at their places of work, but I saw a lot of discussion about New York City schools issuing a ban earlier this week [1]. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-city-schools-banning-zoom-after-security-concerns-2020-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-city-schools-bannin...
- mullen 6y agoThe very large company I work for banned all video conference software except for what is provided by the company. I don't think it is just about security, but make everyone use the same system(s) because it just got too confusing to communicate with other divisions or even departments. You can search for people in other divisions and then video chat with them if you want, or just plain old school voice chat. Luckily, the software we are required use works pretty well on iOS, Android, OSX and Windows.
- downerending 6y agoSupposedly Google just did.
- diebeforei485 6y agoMac App Store version when?
- ken 6y agoOr even a non-MAS app that's sandboxed, if it's going to be free anyway and they prefer to manage their own release schedule.
- adultSwim 6y agoI wonder if Google and Apple were directly involved in the campaign against Zoom.