CIA hackers found a method to break into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages instantly, until the transmission might be protected by the apps transferring them, as stated by the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps such as Signal have rised since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence professionals have linked the spike to widespread concern between 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 Signal and apps like it are actually 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 risk 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 have the keys to unlock the scrambled message they’re sharing, outsiders attempting to intercept the communication would be unable to make sense of it without the key.
But based on the leaked documents, the CIA appears to have bypassed this obstacle by hacking the phones used to send messages or make calls. Hackers who get access to a device’s operating system may be able 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 recommended that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like Signal and WhatsApp to do so.
“The worst thing which can 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 was not instantly clear how many zero-day vulnerabilities were revealed Tuesday, though WikiLeaks wrote in a news release accompanying the leak that the data included 24 such vulnerabilities for Android devices. The data dump included an extensive list of attacks the CIA had used to gain 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 about vulnerabilities. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known.
Critics have denounced the agreement for being opaque and difficult to enforce, while still allowing the government unchecked authority to decide when to keep information that may compromise millions of devices to itself.
The CIA cache published by WikiLeaks seems to validate these concerns, experts said, and point to a need for greater information sharing between government agencies and tech companies.
“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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