CIA hackers discovered a means to break into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages instantly, until the conversation may be encrypted by the apps sending them, according to the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps such as Signal have spiked since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence experts have linked the spike to popular worry between activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump could use the nation”s intelligence apparatus to target them.
On Tuesday, many took to social media to stress over the extent to which messaging apps that they believed secure may not be.
But Moxie Marlinspike, creator of Open Whisper Systems, said, the data show that apps and Signal like it are actually working, if anything.
“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 implies that the people engaged in a conversation have the keys to unlock the scrambled message they are sharing, outsiders attempting to intercept the communication would be unable to make sense of it without the key.
But as stated by the leaked documents, the CIA appears to get bypassed this obstacle by hacking the phones used to send messages or make calls. Hackers which gain access to a device’s operating system can manage to record calls and messages instantly, as a person is speaking into their microphone or typing on their keyboard – before the message is actually sent.
“Once you’ve 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 specialists encouraged that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like WhatsApp and Signal to do so.
“The worst thing that may 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 the story is that the documents confirm that 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 wasn’t instantly clear how many zero-day vulnerabilities were revealed though WikiLeaks wrote in a news release accompanying the leak that the data included 24 such vulnerabilities for Android devices alone. The data dump covered an extensive list of attacks the CIA had used to get access to Apple and Android devices, including several mentions of malicious software that the government appears to have purchased.
For years, technology companies have requested the government to give information on vulnerabilities. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known.
The agreement has been denounced by critics for being opaque and difficult to enforce, while still allowing the government unchecked authority to decide when to keep information that will 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 government agencies and tech companies, and said.
“If there’s a vulnerability in the wild and it is 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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