 LAWMAKERS AND LAW enforcement agencies around the world, including in the United States, have increasingly called for backdoors in the encryption schemes that protect your data, arguing that national security is at stake. But new research indicates governments already have methods and tools that, for better or worse, let them access locked smartphones thanks to weaknesses in the security schemes of Android and iOS. Cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University used publicly available documentation from Apple and Google as well as their own analysis to assess the robustness of Android and iOS encryption. They also studied more than a decade's worth of reports about which of these mobile security features law enforcement and criminals have previously bypassed, or can currently, using special hacking tools. The researchers have dug into the current mobile privacy state of affairs and provided technical recommendations for how the two major mobile operating systems can continue to improve their protections. “It just really shocked me, because I came into this project thinking that these phones are really protecting user data well,” says Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green, who oversaw the research. “Now I’ve come out of the project thinking almost nothing is protected as much as it could be. So why do we need a backdoor for law enforcement when the protections that these phones actually offer are so bad?” Before you delete all your data and throw your phone out the window, though, it's important to understand the types of privacy and security violations the researchers were specifically looking at. When you lock your phone with a passcode, fingerprint lock, or face recognition lock, it encrypts the contents of the device. Even if someone stole your phone and pulled the data off it, they would only see gibberish. Decoding all the data would require a key that only regenerates when you unlock your phone with a passcode, or face or finger recognition. And smartphones today offer multiple layers of these protections and different encryption keys for different levels of sensitive data. Many keys are tied to unlocking the device, but the most sensitive ones require additional authentication. The operating system and some special hardware are in charge of managing all of those keys and access levels so that, for the most part, you never even have to think about it. With all of that in mind, the researchers assumed it would be extremely difficult for an attacker to unearth any of those keys and unlock some amount of data. But that's not what they found. "On iOS in particular, the infrastructure is in place for this hierarchical encryption that sounds really good," says Maximilian Zinkus, a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins who led the analysis of iOS. "But I was definitely surprised to see then how much of it is unused," Zinkus says that the potential is there, but the operating systems don't extend encryption protections as far as they could. When an iPhone has been off and boots up, all the data is in a state Apple calls “Complete Protection.” The user must unlock the device before anything else can really happen, and the device's privacy protections are very high. You could still be forced to unlock your phone, of course, but existing forensic tools would have a difficult time pulling any readable data off it. Once you've unlocked your phone that first time after a reboot, though, a lot of data moves into a different mode—Apple calls it “Protected Until First User Authentication,” but researchers often simply call it “After First Unlock.” If you think about it, your phone is almost always in the AFU state. You probably don't restart your smartphone for days or weeks at a time, and most people certainly don't power it down after each use. (For most, that would mean hundreds of times a day.) So how effective is AFU security? That's where the researchers started to have concerns. For more visit OUR FORUM.  The US National Security Agency (NSA) says that companies should avoid using third party DNS resolvers to block threat actors' DNS traffic eavesdropping and manipulation attempts and to block access to internal network information. NSA's recommendation was made in a new advisory on the benefits (and risks) of using DNS over http (DoH) in enterprise environments, an encrypted domain name system (DNS) protocol that blocks unauthorized access to the DNS traffic between clients and DNS resolvers. "NSA recommends that an enterprise network’s DNS traffic, encrypted or not, be sent only to the designated enterprise DNS resolver," the US intelligence agency said. "This ensures proper use of essential enterprise security controls, facilitates access to local network resources, and protects internal network information." Companies are suggested to use their own enterprise-operated DNS servers or externally hosted services with built-in support for encrypted DNS requests such as DoH. "However, if the enterprise DNS resolver does not support DoH, the enterprise DNS resolver should still be used and all encrypted DNS should be disabled and blocked until encrypted DNS capabilities can be fully integrated into the enterprise DNS infrastructure," the NSA added. The NSA urges enterprise network administrators to disable and block all other DNS services besides their organizations' dedicated ones. Network admins who disable DoH on their networks are also recommended to block "known DoH resolver IP addresses and domains" to block client attempts from using their own DoH resolvers instead of the DHCP-assigned DNS resolver. The agency's advisory also provides additional details on the purpose of DoH and the importance of correctly configuring it to augment enterprise DNS security controls. "We are releasing this guidance to our NSS, DIB, and DoD partners to help them manage encrypted DNS as it is automatically enabled by more applications, as part of our continuous efforts to provide timely, actionable, and relevant cybersecurity guidance," Neal Ziring, Technical Director at NSA, told BleepingComputer. "Encrypted DNS features are becoming more widely supported in commercial products, and our customers need to understand the technology and potential trade-offs." Last year, US government agencies' CIOs were recommended to disable third-party encrypted DNS services until an official DNS resolution service with DoH and DNS over TLS (DoT) support would be available. CISA also reminded that agencies are legally required to use the EINSTEIN 3 Accelerated (E3A) DNS service on all devices connected to federal agency networks as the primary (or ultimate) upstream DNS resolver for all local DNS recursive resolvers. Until a DNS resolution service with DoH and DoT support was made available, federal agencies were also recommended to "set and enforce enterprise-wide policy (e.g., Group Policy Objects [GPO] for Windows environments) for installed browsers to disable DoH use." DoH allows DNS resolution requests over encrypted http connections, while DoT will encrypt and wrap all DNS queries using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol instead of using insecure plain text DNS lookups. "The 'Adopting Encrypted DNS in Enterprise Environments' Cybersecurity Information Sheet provides National Security System (NSS), Department of Defense (DoD), and Defense Industrial Base (DIB) network administrators guidance on proper network configuration for handling encrypted domain name system traffic," Ziring added. Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM.  Congressional threats and inducements make Twitter and Facebook censorship a free-speech violation. Facebook and Twitter banned President Trump and numerous supporters after last week’s disgraceful Capitol riot, and Google, Apple and Amazon blocked Twitter alternative Parler—all based on claims of “incitement to violence” and “hate speech.” Silicon Valley titans cite their ever-changing “terms of service,” but their selective enforcement suggests political motives. |
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