CIA hackers found out a way to get into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages immediately, until the transmission might be protected by the apps transferring them, as stated by the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps such as Signal have spiked since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence professionals have linked the spike to widespread worry among activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump might use the nation”s intelligence apparatus to target them.
On Tuesday, many took to social media to fret the extent to which messaging apps that they believed secure may not be over.
But Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Open Whisper Systems, said, if anything, the data show that Signal and apps 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 danger 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 means 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 having the key.
But based on the leaked documents, the CIA appears to have bypassed this obstacle by hacking. Hackers which gain access to a device’s operating system might manage to record calls and messages immediately, as a person is speaking in their microphone or typing on their keyboard – before the message is actually sent.
“Once you have 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 experts advised that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like Signal and WhatsApp to do so.
“The worst thing that could 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 keeps 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 straight clear how many zero-day vulnerabilities were revealed Tuesday, though WikiLeaks wrote in a news release accompanying the leak that 24 such vulnerabilities were included by the data for Android devices alone. The data dump included a detailed list of attacks the CIA had used to get access to Apple and Android devices, including several mentions of malicious software the government appears to have purchased.
For years, technology companies have requested the government to give details about vulnerabilities. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, which asked intelligence agencies to disclose as many security vulnerabilities as possible unless there was a demonstrated public interest in keeping some quiet.
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 published by WikiLeaks seems to validate these concerns, experts point to a need for greater information sharing between tech companies and government agencies, and said.
“If there is a vulnerability in the wild and it’s not making it into the hands of the vendor so that it can be resolved, something is broken,” Rice said. “This ultimately strains tech companies’ relationship with the U.S. government.”
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