this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
274 points (98.2% liked)

World News

32316 readers
1295 users here now

News from around the world!

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
274
New revelations from the Snowden archive surface (www.computerweekly.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A decade after Snowden exposed NSA’s mass surveillance in cooperation with the British GCHQ, only about 1 percent of the documents have been published, but three major facts can finally be revealed thanks to a doctoral thesis in applied cryptography by Jacob Appelbaum.

all 35 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 104 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The most disturbing part of this for me is how:

  • 99% of Snowden's revelations have never been published

  • several of the existing copies of Snowden's documents have subsequently been destroyed

I also find it depressing that people like Appelbaum are routinely criminalized:

Public speeches made by Appelbaum taking a humorous and provocative tone and with titles like “Sysadmins of the World, Unite!” were interpreted as an attempt to recruit sources and as incitement to steal classified documents. To this day, however, there are no publicly-known charges against Appelbaum or Harrison.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I would bet the Russians know 100% of that 99%

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Rapidcreek

I would bet the Russians know 100%

Their surveillance people do, sure - just like all the 5-Eyes governments obviously know 100% and so do any spooks from anywhere else with competent spy networks, including the Chinese, Israelis, etc etc.

That's not really my point though. It's ordinary people that need to know about it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think they are up to 14 eyes.

Gawdamn beholder in here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

@jhulten

Good point. I have kind of lost track.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Snowden asserted and still does that he deleted his own copies once Greenwald et al. got their copies, well before he had to flee Hong Kong and ended up trapped in Russia.

Remember, it was the US who trapped him in Russia by revoking his passport -- an international crime in and of itself, rendering him stateless which no country should do to its citizens, no matter what crimes they have allegedly commited -- and he had no intention of ending up there; he was trying to get to Chile I believe, and the EU did the unprecedented step of force-grounding their equivalent of Air Force One, with their president on board, thinking Snowden was a passenger.

Imagine if the POTUS had his plane accompanied by fighter jets to force-land in any other nation. The response would have been explosive, literally. Such hypocrisy that they just wave off other nations' sovereignty and diplomatic norms on the treatment of foreign leaders so easily.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So now I'm supposed to trust what Snowden says? That's pretty funny.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

According to Jacob Appelbaum, The Intercept - the media outlet co-founded by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to publish the Snowden files - is no longer in possession of the documents. "I was informed that they destroyed their copy of the archive", Appelbaum tells us.

I thought this was an interesting tidbit. It's been a minute since I heard anything about Appelbaum. A while back he had some metoo type allegations, but I never really paid attention to what became of that or him afterward.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20895270/jacob-appelbaum-peter-todd-rape-allegations-defamation-bitcoin-tor

This is the most recent news that pops up about that controversy.

I don't disagree with Appelbaum, however, that it's a little bit unconscionable that those files were destroyed. There's a lot of valid criticism in the way Wikileaks does things, with a large data-dump, but it never really felt like we actually got the full picture of what was happening with the Snowden files, with so much of it never actually being published or written about.

I do wonder if Laura Poitras still has a copy, but as a filmmaker who works less in information security, it seems more doubtful.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

The compromised Lawful Interception infrastructure is a pretty big deal. It shows the risks of having that sort of backdoor and makes it harder to argue for them. (Unless you're the UK or Australia, then lol what privacy).

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A timely reminder that none of this shit was rolled-back and in fact in some countries *cough* UK *cough* it was simply made legal with new laws.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

We're screwed, and have been for decades...

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Cavium stuff mentioning RNGs being compromised reminded me about this recent headline about fTPM RNG being wonky on some AMD motherboards.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/31/linus_torvalds_ftpm/

Probably not related, right? I wonder who the fTPM manufacture is for these boards.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A discrete TPM has a separate manufacturer. The AMD fTPM is made by AMD, and they have already explained the issue.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor

The PSP itself represents an ARM core (ARM Cortex A5[6][circular reference]) with the TrustZone extension which is inserted into the main CPU die as a coprocessor. The PSP contains on-chip firmware which is responsible for verifying the SPI ROM and loading off-chip firmware from it.

Critics worry it can be used as a backdoor and is a security concern.[3][4][5] AMD has denied requests to open source the code that runs on the PSP.

The PSP also provides a random number generator for the RDRAND instruction[10] and provides TPM services.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes, exactly. It has similar concerns to Intel ME (and its fTPM). “I wonder who the fTPM manufacturer is” makes no sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Then who makes the coprocessor that is inserted into the die?

Looking into more details of the boot process, it seems like the UEFI manufacturers such as AMI or Phoenix might be the best place to insert a pre-OS boot back door. The PSP (CCP) is just what is used to bootstrap before this step in the process.

https://www.igorslab.de/en/inside-amd-bios-what-is-really-hidden-behind-agesa-the-psp-platform-security-processor-and-the-numbers-of-combo-pi/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Then who makes the coprocessor that is inserted into the die?

AMD, obviously, they're not going to let anyone mess with their lithography masks. With IP bought from ARM, to wit: It's a Cortex A5, which is a bog-standard block of IP if you need something better than a microcontroller but not really beefy either. Or you could say that TSMC makes them, just as the rest of the silicon.

(AMD also has an ARM architecture license and thus the right to design its own ARM cores but a) those were designed to be in a completely different performance class (application server) and b) they never made it to market. They're now probably tinkering on RISC-V in the background in their eternal quest to not have Intel fused to their hip by x86).

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

What an authoritarian hellhole!