CIA hackers uncovered a method to get into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages instantly, before the transmission may be protected by the apps sending them, according to the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps such as Signal have rised since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence specialists have attributed the spike to widespread concern among activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump would use the nation”s intelligence apparatus to focus on them.
On Tuesday, many took to social media to stress 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 apps and Signal 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 only the people have the keys to unlock the scrambled message they are sharing would be unable to understand it without the key.
But in accordance with the leaked documents, the CIA seems to have bypassed this obstacle by hacking. Hackers who get access to a device’s operating system could be able to record calls and messages instantly, as a person is speaking in 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 professionals recommended that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like Signal and WhatsApp to do so.
“The worst thing which 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 this story is that the documents confirm that the CIA holds on to security vulnerabilities in software and devices ” including Android phones, iPhones and Samsung television – that millions of people round the world rely on.”
It wasn’t immediately 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. The data dump provided an extensive list of attacks the CIA had used to get access to Android and Apple devices, including several mentions of malicious software that the government appears to have purchased.
For years, technology companies have requested the government to give over information on zero days it discovers and vulnerabilities. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known.
Critics have long denounced the agreement for being opaque and difficult to enforce, while still allowing the government unchecked authority to decide when to keep information that could 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 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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