Hosted by Paul Kocher, President and Chief Scientist, Cryptography Research, the Cryptographers’ Panel for the RSA Conference 2015 boasted the panelists:
- Ron Rivest, Vannevar Bush Professor, MIT
- Adi Shamir, Professor, Computer Science Department, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
- Whitfield Diffie, Cryptographer & Security Expert, Cryptomathic
- Ed Giorgio, Cryptographer and Security Expert, KEYW
Beginning with the notable events over the past year, Rivest mentioned a result by Antoine Joux that establishes a qualitative improvement over the running time required to solve the discrete log problem over finite fields.
Shamir highlighted the following laws of security that he phrased for a talk he gave in the 80’s:
1. Secure systems do not exist today and will not exist in the future.
2. Crypto will not be broken, it will be bypassed.
3. If you want to halve your vulnerabilities, you have to double your costs.
Shamir further focused on attacks on IoT devices like automated lighting systems that use a temporary insecure Wi-fi. He spoke about having developed an app that helps leak any information to anyone outside the security perimeter by rapidly flickering the light intensity by an amount indiscernible to the human eye.
Diffie entered the fray by pointing out fundamental conflicts between network businesses and their customers. He further stressed on how the privileges companies demand have been the gateway to intrusion by other people.
Ed Giorgio delved into his 30-year NSA career and pointed out the differences between codemaking and codebreaking and remarked that “Codemaking is more important, (while) codebreaking is more fun”.
He next focused on the disparity between the number of people working on codebreaking and those working on codemaking, the latter outnumbering the former, according to his NSA and GCHQ experiences. Further, he explained codemaking as a top-down, inductive science where assumptions are made and conclusions are drawn from first principles.
Giorgio then explained cryptanalysis as a bottom-up, experimental science that focuses on maximizing functions as opposed to cryptography that delves into complexity theory. He also remarked that once people become cryptographers, they tend to stay cryptographers, while cryptanalysts because of their ability to understand data, can go a lot further.
Diffie, citing NSA as an example, stated that with the decline in the number of algorithms being used for various purposes, more people have been focusing on breaking existing systems as opposed to inventing new ones.
Kocher then touched upon the past year as being a very active year for financial criminals. He pointed out the collapse of the cryptocurrencies Mt. Gox, My Coin, FlexCoin and asked the panelists their views on the way ahead.
Rivest revealed a digital currency initiative by MIT and expressed interest in the design and management of distributed consensus protocols that underlie the current scheme of alt coins. On the related topic of anonymous payments, Rivest expressed his lack of surety on the public’s stand on policy implementation.
Shamir, on BitCoin, spoke about the community as being torn between the possibilities of wanting to be anarchist rebels and wanting to replace the feared currencies in the world.
Kocher then probed the panelists on the role of EMV smart cards that were recently introduced in the US. Rivest focused on the policy change that encourages vendors to use the chip-and-pin system on the EMV card or become liable for fraudulent transactions, as a step forward in the adoption of cryptographic best practices.
Shamir added, based on his experience in Europe, that though the use of chip-and-pin reduced the amount of fraud substantially, but should not be treated as a panacea. He further exemplified his belief using Apple Pay, where, according to media reports, there exist major vulnerabilities when giving payment credentials to the system.
Giorgio described the introduction the EMV as a shift of the attack surface, and that innovative criminals will find ways to exploit it. He expressed concern about the attacks that get access to the actual card i.e. the skimmer.
Moving on to a more ‘glamorous’ topic, Kocher asked the panelists their views on the Academy award-winning movie ‘The Imitation Game’ that focuses on Alan Turing’s cryptanalytic work, as well as their thoughts on whether the Hollywood portrayal of cryptography differs from the real world.
Giorgio showed appreciation for the movie, yet pointed out the omission of Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski who decrypted the Enigma before the British.
Diffie mentioned that the movie overlooked the Fish cipher systems (Tunny & Sturgeon -the Berlin army headquarter systems) in favour of the more popular Enigma – the division-level system. He simultaneously pitched in a historical edition of the report titled ‘Breaking Teleprinter Ciphers at Bletchley Park’ by J.V. Field, Jim Reeds and Diffie himself to be available later in the year – work that Diffie believes is the road into modern cryptanalysis.
Kocher then brought in the topic of key escrow and the increasing demand from government agencies viz. NSA & FBI for a ‘front door’ and turned to the panelists for a discussion on its technological and policy implications.
Rivest explained the goal of key escrow which is to make plaintext and keys accessible to law enforcement/intelligence agencies. Rivest went in further that the keys need to be stored appropriately, and if there are many locks on the doors, then keys should be stored in a threshold secretory manner. Given that we live in a global information system, Rivest viewed the demand for a ‘front door’ as a house with many doors with keys held by many parties, which he felt will not work.
Shamir spoke about the NSA’s misunderstanding of the proposed secret-sharing aspect of the key escrow, wherein the shares would behave in a correlated way where the government would come in with the same instructions regardless of whether the shares are held by the department of Justice, or the Commerce department or the FBI etc. Thus, all the shares are either going to be revealed all at once or none at all, defeating the core concept of secret sharing itself.
Diffie remarked that law enforcement agencies read traffic that is pre-encrypted before being sent into the channel, then they would have to resort back to their older means and would have to order data owners to tell them how to read the inner layer. Diffie wondered if they would rule against super-encrypting and sample data to check for super-encryption.
Diffie also spoke about a concept Rivest invented called ‘Digital Time Capsule’ where Rivest designed a cryptosystem against which the best analytic method was not very subject to Moore’s law improvements, the idea being to set an amount of difficulty that isn’t zero or infinite on reading traffic. Diffie argues that in such a case, targeted interception would be possible, where law enforcement agencies could do 260 operations to read someone’s traffic, but would not be able to do that amount of processing to read everyone’s traffic.
Giorgio talked about his experiences with Scott Charney 20 years ago when Charney had a mandate from the vice-president to discuss a front door. Giorgio described how Charney understood the relationships not only with the U.S. companies but also with the liaison relationships with law enforcement agencies overseas, alluding to Rivest’s comment about key escrow being not just a U.S.-only problem.
Giorgio further described a telephone equipment manufacturing company that could not sell units anywhere in the world without a law enforcement access capability, as anyone with a telephone system would want a law enforcement access capability. Giorgio didn’t see the law enforcement agencies from different countries going away and so it will be an on-going negotiation, which he termed as ‘Key Escrow 2.0’.
Diffie chipped in by saying that the telecom companies in the U.S. fought the communications assistance for law enforcement act because they saw it as a big expense for which they didn’t see how they were going to be reimbursed, and then it turned into a cash cow – the fact that you couldn’t sell one without key escrow, didn’t mean they were not being paid for.
Kocher then probed the panelists about their thoughts on ransomware and himself described it as the pure evil incarnation of public key cryptography. Rivest commented on cryptography as being of dual-use, mostly to the good, but not without its downsides.
Shamir remarked about the financial rewards for ransomware being paid in BitCoin due to its unregulated and semi-anonymous nature. Shamir further stressed upon ransomware spreading to a variety of devices given the recent advent of IoT. He mentioned that it is extremely difficult for the user to decide whether or not to open a suspicious email or not, and hinted towards a modified Turing test whether an automated system can look at your 100 latest emails and do an automated spill fishing and send you a email to convince you to click any link. He also touched upon the fact that police in Maine had to pay $300 to get their police computers released from scamsters.
Diffie suggested the use of backups to protect data from ransomware. Shamir added that backups are usualy corrupted by the ransomware. Rivest spoke about a cloud service that he suspects provides backup versions that aren’t accessible to be encrypted by the malware. Giorgio added that once criminals penetrate someone’s computer, they can blackmail people for things other than the keys to encrypted data.
Rivest, on anonymous payments, expressed that the ability of scam artists to extort people depends in part on anonymous payments. He strongly felt that anonymous communications between people is essential for democracy. Shamir expressed surety that once BitCoin gets regulated, police will have a way to trace payments to criminals.
In closing, Kocher probed the panists about the latest NSA rvelations over the past year. About the Snowden revelations, Diffie spoke about the Internet Security Act of 1950 which was the root of most classification, and is described top secret information as information whose disclosure could be expected to cause extremely grave damage to the U.S. Diffie deemed the Snowden revelations to be minor nuisance compared to the 9/11 attacks and the loss of New York Outright.
Finally, Diffie mentioned the loss of Scott Vanstone who worked on elliptic-curve cryptography, as well as of Hal Finney – a developer first at PGP and later worked on BitCoin.
Shamir took on the NSA criticising them for their excessive use of virtual force that creates too much collateral damage. He exemplified his stance by speaking about the recent break-in into Jim Alto – the largest manufacturers of SIM cards wherein the NSA grabbed the SIM card keys by use of force.
Giorgio pointed out the price NSA will have to pay following its mandate to compartmentalize information sharing within itself, in light of Snowden’s revelations.
Rivest elucidated how Snowden’s revelations have made people aware of the extent to which mass surveillance is a factor in society. On addressing the issue, he mentioned that the Patriot Act is up for renewal. He also recommended the John Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden.
Quotes:
– “Companies want you to be secure, but not against them.” – Whitfield Diffie.
– “Codemaking is more important, codebreaking is more fun.” – Ed Giorgio.
– “Codebreaking is an art, and codemaking is a science.” – Adi Shamir.
– “Should we have regulations or legislations that makes software vendors liable for implementing poor choices?” – Ronal Rivest.
– “In my opinion, there is really no difference between front doors and back door – the only difference is that the NSA will have to take your house and turn it around. “ – Adi Shamir.
– “As an inventor of one of the algorithms, I feel like the mother whose son has been brainwashed and is off to become a jihadist in Syria.” – Ron Rivest on ransomware.
REFERENCES:
– The Cryptographers’ Panel | USA 2015 RSA Conference
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