Glenn Greenwald. (photo: AP)
NSA
Targeted "The Two Leading" Encryption Chips
By Glenn Greenwald, The
Intercept
06 January 16
On
September 5, 2013, The Guardian,
the New York Times and ProPublica jointly
reported — based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden — that
the National Security Agency had compromised some of the encryption that is
most commonly used to secure internet transactions. The NYT explained
that NSA “has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital
scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive
data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the
emails, web searches, internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others
around the world.” One 2010 memo described that “for the past decade, NSA has
led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used internet encryption
technologies.”
In
support of the reporting, all three papers published redacted portions of
documents from the NSA along with its British counterpart, GCHQ. Prior to
publication of the story, the NSA vehemently argued that any reporting of any
kind on this program would jeopardize national security by alerting terrorists
to the fact that encryption products had been successfully compromised. After
the stories were published, U.S. officials aggressively attacked the
newspapers for endangering national security and helping terrorists with these
revelations.
All
three newspapers reporting this story rejected those arguments prior to
publication and decided to report the encryption-cracking successes. Then-NYT Executive
Editor Jill Abramson described the decision
to publish as “not a particularly anguished one” in light of the public
interest in knowing about this program, and ProPublica editors
published a lengthy explanation along
with the story justifying their decision.
All
three outlets, while reporting the anti-encryption efforts, redacted portions of
the documents they published or described. One redaction in particular, found
in the NYT documents,
from the FY 2013 “black budget,” proved to be especially controversial among
tech and security experts, as they believed that the specific identity of
compromised encryption standards was being concealed by the redaction.
None
of the documents in the Snowden archive identify all or even most of the
encryption standards that had been targeted, and there was a concern that if an
attempt were made to identify one or two of them, it could mislead the public
into believing that the others were safe. There also seemed to be a concern among
some editors that any attempt to identify specific encryption standards would
enable terrorists to know which ones to avoid. One redaction in particular,
from the NYT, was designed to strike this balance and was the one
that became most controversial:
The
issue of this specific redaction was raised again by
security researchers last month in the wake of news of a backdoor
found on Juniper systems, followed by The Intercept’s reporting that the NSA and
GCHQ had targeted Juniper. In light of that news, we examined the documents
referenced by those 2013 articles with particular attention to that
controversial redaction, and decided that it was warranted to un-redact that
passage. It reads as follows:
Textual
data. (photo: The Intercept)
The
reference to “the two leading encryption chips” provides some hints, but no
definitive proof, as to which ones were successfully targeted. Matthew Green, a
cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins, declined to speculate on which companies
this might reference. But he said that “the damage has already been done. From
what I’ve heard, many foreign purchasers have already begun to look at all
U.S.-manufactured encryption technology with a much more skeptical eye as a
result of what the NSA has done. That’s too bad, because I suspect only a
minority of products have been compromised this way.”
NSA
requested until 5 p.m. today to respond but then failed to do so. (Update:
The NSA subsequently emailed to say: “It would be accurate to state that NSA
declined to comment.”)
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