| |
| ▲ | strictnein 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > NSA literally has MITM proxies/interception of any traffic they want inside every major US tech company No, they don't. | | |
| ▲ | ai_critic 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A Yeah, they did (and probably do). | | |
| ▲ | parineum 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | How are they going to MITM communications with certs that never left my machine? Are you suggesting they broke TLS or that they've somehow acquired every private cert generated? | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | How closely have you reviewed your browser's list of default trusted CAs? | | |
| ▲ | distill17801 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I second this: HTTPS (as most consumers use it) is probably a front (who are these CA's really anyway?) Plot twist: _Perhaps_ Mythos / Fable keeps explaining ways (that we can't comprehend or don't always work) to break HTTPS due to the three letter agencies making sure they had input on their creation (and thus backdoors, I mean "bugs"), so the real catastrophe they are hiding is that HTTPS is broken (for most people, most of the time.) Remember when Quantum computing was the threat to HTTPS? Turns out it was the humans own inability to think outside of the box! | | | |
| ▲ | parineum 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | My trusted CA doesn't have my private key, they only attest that my public key belongs to me. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Your many, many default-trusted CAs can mint new certs for the sites you visit. | | |
| ▲ | parineum 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Which would be easily detectable if the cert I'm using on my server didn't match the one that was being served publicly. There's really no way this conspiracy theory works if "they" have a copy of every single private cert generated. Which would be impressive because I can generate one myself and get it trusted without ever sending it and would be easily able to detect a MITM attack. Not to mention most sites are going to use pinned certs so any repeat visitors to a site will notice a cert change associated with a MITM. This whole idea relies on the assumption that everyone is trusting third parties with their private certs. That is not at all required. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Which would be easily detectable if the cert I'm using on my server didn't match the one that was being served publicly. I'm not sure why your focus is so heavily on your server. Is that the only thing on the internet you care about? > Not to mention most sites are going to use pinned certs so any repeat visitors to a site will notice a cert change associated with a MITM. Most haven't even heard of pinned certs. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517745.3561439 "we find that 0.9% to 8% of Android apps and 2.5% to 11% of iOS apps use certificate pinning at run time" |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | aleqs 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You just intercept the traffic after its decrypted on the server side, or are you suggesting you somehow send encrypted traffic that never gets decrypted? | | |
| ▲ | gaadd33 3 days ago | parent [-] | | So the NSA streams the memory contents of every virtual machine and bare metal server on the internet to get the decrypted traffic? How would that even work at the scale of the internet? | | |
| ▲ | aleqs 2 days ago | parent [-] | | How it works is they build a huge virtual strawman which decrypts and reads all of the data for them then posts online about how NSA spying on people is literally impossible. |
|
| |
| ▲ | distill17801 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > How are they going to MITM communications with certs that never left my machine? The long game. They: - make sure you wouldn't be in a position to need to transmit data anywhere that would receive it without CA's in their hypothetical pocket - manage the evolution of the cloud industry to make sure portable VM's and Containers can have their data archived (both in-RAM, disk, hey just send us the running VM!) - backdoor'd encryption algorithms from the design and implementation phase to ensure a global unlocking mechanism for any data encrypted by anybody who used a large class of extremely commonly available software So, you run your own private bank in a cloud VM with tenant managed keys? They backdoor'd the encryption algorithm your cloud VM disk relies on, because they blackmailed one of the developers at the company who developed the hypervisor system used by your provider. Open source project? Perfect. (If you think this is nonsense, then remember the rapid discovery of ancient "bugs" causing all this drama to begin with.) Your TLS privately generated certs that are 100% foolproof aren't actually used anywhere encrypting the data they want, because it's either worthless, or, available elsewhere perhaps at a different (or same) time. | | |
| ▲ | parineum 3 days ago | parent [-] | | And you're saying "they" (red flag) have done this with every cert generated? | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 3 days ago | parent [-] | | They've most certainly tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrun_(decryption_program) If you're a specific target of a nation-state level actor, things get worse; they just grab your hardware mid-shipment on its way to you. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/report-nsa-intercepts... | | |
| ▲ | parineum 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > They've most certainly tried. And failed. > If you're a specific target... If you're a specific target, they have to spend an incredibly number of man-hours and money to get into your private data. This proves my point. This shows the effort required to infiltrate _one_ target and you're suggesting they've infiltrated everything by default. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > And failed. How would you know about the successes? Thinking this is the one and only time they tried it is... interesting. (Plus: "it was, for seven years, one of four CSPRNGs standardized in NIST SP 800-90A") > If you're a specific target, they have to spend an incredibly number of man-hours and money to get into your private data. No, this demonstrates an actor of that power level doesn't even need to compromise encryption, and can get deeper access to everything, if it's worth it to them. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
| |
| ▲ | distill17801 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I recall having a nuclear meltdown personally when I heard about all of this in the mid aughts. Nobody cared. Nobody understands this today. Everyone just complains about the Donald, but I point to this, and they don't realize the connection. | | |
| ▲ | wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Even after Snowden exposed everything, nobody really cared unfortunately |
|
| |
| ▲ | vintermann 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's back to the question of how much you should give the benefit of doubt to powerful people who openly lie. | | |
| ▲ | strictnein 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It's just not technically feasible, so there's nothing to lie about. They're not MITMing petabytes/sec across dozens (hundreds?) of companies and they haven't broken TLS1.3. If I have a box at Digital Ocean and I'm communicating with it with TLS1.3 using a Let's Encrypt cert that I generated, where, exactly, does this magical MITM box come into play? | | |
| ▲ | drdexebtjl 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That "box" is a virtual machine, no? Do you know what hypervisor is managing it? :) | | |
| ▲ | strictnein 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | So now this magical NSA decryption system is inside every hypervisor? You realize how ridiculous that is, right? | |
| ▲ | chews 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | ... not your machines, not your crypto... |
| |
| ▲ | aleqs 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Of course it's feasible, you just intercept the traffic post-decryption on the cloud/server side. You don't control how/where your traffic to 3p cloud services is decrypted. | | |
| ▲ | kelnos 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You keep saying this, but it's nonsensical. If I terminate TLS on the box that does processing, there's nothing to intercept. And these days (especially post-Snowden), many (most?) companies encrypt data when sending between servers within their own (private network) infrastructure. | | |
| ▲ | aleqs 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You have no control about where TLS is terminated when you're talking to a 3p cloud service (with services you don't control/run like cloud LLM APIs). You also have no control about what spyware is installed on/around VMs you rent (and there's a lot). Also when talking about encryption between servers within datacenters you seem to be missing that in order for such multi -stage/path encryption (separate certs/keys) to be possible the data first has to be decrypted at each point, not to mention every major US tech company generally cooperates with the NSA and gives them access to anything they request (including allowing the installation of dedicated hardware to intercept decrypted traffic as has been publicly exposed documented many times already). Yours and others' claims that it's impossible and nonsensical is based on lack of understanding. Yours and others' claims that things somehow got better after Snowden is just a completely baseless statement - if you actually looked into what happened post-Snowden - absolutely nothing was done to prevent NSA spying on any communications they want, in fact it got significantly worse. | | |
| ▲ | strictnein 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Yours and others' claims that it's impossible and nonsensical is based on lack of understanding. lol, no, it's really not. > Also when talking about encryption between servers within datacenters you seem to be missing that in order for such multi -stage/path encryption (separate certs/keys) to be possible the data first has to be decrypted at each point Why would I want the data to be decrypted at each point and why would datacenters do that? Encrypting and decrypting data is expensive computationally, so that's not how things work at all. There's no need to decrypt data to know where it needs to go. That's why we have TCP/IP and other similar stadards. The datacenters can maybe add another layer of encryption on top of my data as its moving around their networks, but there's absolutely no way for them to strip off my encryption. > Yours and others' claims that things somehow got better after Snowden is just a completely baseless statement Things didn't magically get better. A lot of people worked hard to improve the overall security posture of the industry. | | |
| ▲ | aleqs 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > lol, no, it's really not. Yeah it definitely is lol. > Why would I want the data to be decrypted at each point and why would datacenters do that? When we talk about data that is sent for processing to a 3p server (like anthropic in this case) the data obviously needs to be decrypted to be processed. As to why data is decrypted at each point in a typical large backend system - because other than network routing there are presumably multiple services that need to receive and act on this data somehow - you're not just sending encrypted data around to random servers. > there's absolutely no way for them to strip off my encryption. You don't seem to understand that you have no control over the encryption or decryption done on the backends of cloud services you use. I don't know how to make it more simple and obvious at this point. Again, the context here is Anthropic and sending your data to their (or any other big tech API). But even if we move away from this model and suppose you are running your own services on rented cloud VM - then it should be obvious that you don't have full control or even access to this VM... any actor with access can install or modify any software, install/modify EBPF, modified crypto libraries, etc. - you have absolutely no control or say over this. > Things didn't magically get better. Things didn't get better at all, they got much worse. | |
| ▲ | drdexebtjl 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Why would I want the data to be decrypted at each point and why would datacenters do that? I think they mean the data must have existed in plain text before it was encrypted, and will exist in plain text after it is decrypted. At some point “your” server in a datacenter somewhere needs to decrypt the data to do something useful with it, after all you’re paying for compute, and homeomorphic encryption is too slow, so the work is done in unencrypted data. There it is. Your data in plain text in RAM. TLS will protect your data in transit, but it can’t protect you against a compromised recipient. | | |
| ▲ | gaadd33 3 days ago | parent [-] | | So the NSA streams the ram of every virtual machine and bare metal server on the internet to themselves so they can analyze the plain text that's being processed in ram and no one has noticed this network traffic? How could that even be possible? If I buy a 100Mbps network connection from someone, they just provision a bit more so that the NSA streaming doesn't impact or show up? | | |
| ▲ | drdexebtjl 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Why would they have to stream, and why would it have to be every server? They could just do this to the specific servers they want, at specific times. Just like wiretapping didn’t mean listening to every phone, and every conversation. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | distill17801 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's generally accepted fact that the NSA broke HTTPS, for some of the time, for some of the services. It's unclear what they do have, but you'd be naive to assume consumer HTTPS is keeping them out. It's too complicated. Do you know everything about CA, SSL, HTTPS, and so on? You make $250k a year working on it? Do you _really_, _really_, know everything? Then you're fired because you're lying to yourself, so you're probably unbearable to work with. We were all freaking out about this with AT&T Thing nearly twenty years ago: and when nobody cared (Bush ran two terms! it helped to pretend AT&T was the only one affected), it gave "them" implicit permission to do it again with Google / Yahoo thing (it helped to pretend those were the only two cloud providers affected) ten years ago. Now, we're all pretending that capitalism is real, and that the three letter agencies are just sittin' on the sidelines, while the world's largest data archiving opportunity is happening voluntarily (some are even PAYING for it!), at some wild-growth companies (with leaders who have too much to lose), who also have existed for just a few years? A 5 year old could probably blackmail Sam Altman, what about all the other middle management? The individual contributors (if they still exist) are of no concern: work is a commodity, it's easy to silo a worker's knowledge. Surveillance opportunity is 10x social media from last decade, because they still have social media, and now, they've began thinking for people. How easy when it is an app on your smartphone. Those mind control experiments back in the 60's with Acid are looking silly by now. Besides, how do you know that the response you're getting wasn't manipulated (and define 'manipulated' across a spectrum of training to nefarious actors impersonating models, by power of court order.) If you think all of that is unfounded ridiculous blasphemy, let me distract you with this instead: if the AI bubble bursts, the compute will be repurposed for mass AI / ML driven CCTV surveillance. Hell, maybe they'll find a way to give you a tax break if you sell your CCTV footage. "NSA literally has MITM proxies/interception of any traffic they want inside every major US tech company" even if this statement is an exaggeration, by playing the long game, they get themselves setup to access what they want in the future. I'm not for or against, but I do live in a safe place thanks to such surveillance (generally in the USA), and I want you to know that this AI Thing is only the latest chapter in the intelligence story. | | |
| ▲ | strictnein 3 days ago | parent [-] | | What does it mean to "break HTTPS"? Also, there's no such thing as "consumer HTTPS". As for the rest of this... how many conspiracy theories are you trying to pack into a statement? > "even if this statement is an exaggeration" It's not an exaggeration, it is simply false. |
| |
| ▲ | chews 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | XMPPwocky 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > This was their third office space, serving as their headquarters before they outgrew it and eventually relocated to Market Square at 1355 Market Street in 2012. The arab spring twitter uprising was fully a CIA/NSA operation. To be clear, the claim you're making is that because Twitter has their third corporate office in the same building as an AT&T switching center, and US intelligence used a room in AT&T's switching center for surveillance, then Twitter must have been controlled by US intelligence? And thus the Arab Spring uprising, where Twitter was used, was "fully a CIA/NSA operation"? | | |
| ▲ | chews 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, twitter was used by US 3 letter agencies to assist in the arab spring. To be able to do it in a surreptitious way they were asked to move to that building and get access to all private DMs, and for doing so they got a fat tax break to move to "blighted" market street current location. All of those things fit the timeline and snowden capability disclosures. The CIA venture arm InQTel invested in Dataminr a company that twitter was also a major shareholder.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-inves... |
| |
| ▲ | strictnein 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, you have collected a lot of random bits of information from over a decade ago. I'm sure everything you say is still relevant today, especially the conspiracy nonsense. Some of us actually work in security, while others think the NSA and CIA are some magically powerful orgs. Explain how, even with the mystical Room 641A, the NSA can't break a TLS1.3 protected communication channel without either party knowing about it. Assume you have generated a cert with Let's Encrypt. How, exactly, does that work? | | |
| ▲ | chews 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | you compel the host under similar threat of non-existance to grant you view of the hypervisor. you're not running on bare metal with alternate TPM's that arent the Intel IMU (also backdoor'd) so you're just as pwnable. now say you're doing this on a raspberry pi or other openhardware like a librum machine with a yubikey hsm on local wifi or physical ethernet... you may have a shot at the privacy you're looking for. | |
| ▲ | aleqs 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Explain to me how you are going to encrypt your LLM API calls with your let's encrypt cert. There are also multiple ways/places traffic you send to typical cloud/tech company is decrypted and can be intercepted. (Surprised I have to point this out to someone who 'actually works in security ' lol) Not to mention US tech companies fully cooperate with the NSA in many cases and are aware of this going on. | | |
| ▲ | chews 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | why is europe going to such great lengths to build datacenters and ensure they have no connection to US jurisdiction... GDPR means nothing if there is a persistent threat installed on every instance. | |
| ▲ | strictnein 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Explain to me how you are going to encrypt your LLM API calls with your let's encrypt cert. I mean, there's goal post moving and there's just building a whole new stadium across the country. | | |
| ▲ | aleqs 2 days ago | parent [-] | | This thread is literally about anthropic API, you should move that stadium back. |
|
| |
| ▲ | sailfast 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Thank you. |
| |
| ▲ | kelnos 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | That sounds like a lot of unsubstantiated, circumstantial, conspiracy-theory nonsense. |
|
| |
| ▲ | yard2010 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Please provide sources for such bold claims | | |
| ▲ | aleqs 3 days ago | parent [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://www.wired.com/2013/10/nsa-hacked-yahoo-google-cables... https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying | | |
| ▲ | schoen 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I worked on these cases at EFF and I'm skeptical of the automatic "NSA has access to everything" intuition. What we learned from that era includes things like (1) spy agencies are incredibly aggressive and pursue tons of different angles to get access to things (2) spy agencies have a lot of money (3) spy agencies often have interpretations of law that would surprise the public or legal experts (and sometimes courts have issued sealed rulings permitting them to do things that surprise the public or legal experts later when they're unsealed) (4) some people throughout different parts of society assume culturally that companies in a country "should" generally help the spy agencies of that country's government because they are the "good guys" or "on the same team" or whatever These things are all pretty bad and scary, but they still don't imply absolutely infinite power or access, because all of them come with different kinds of pushback. People also just tell them no! I want to write an article with a colleague about the continuing role of culture here, because I think there are companies or industries where the default reaction is to want to cooperate with the government, and others where the default reaction is not that. There are certainly secret things that have never come out, e.g. whatever Senator Wyden keeps alluding to, and what kind of program or authority was behind the interception of hardware shipments to covertly tamper with them, and whether there is a bulk financial data interception program, and presumably lots of other stuff. I don't agree with these things, and I want them to be exposed and stopped, and I also don't think they constitute infinite power over all parts of the tech industry. |
|
| |
| ▲ | distill17801 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Propaganda indeed: my instinct says we are being lied to about how three letter agencies and military are paying for services. They give us a PR front that Uncle Sam is a regular paying customer just like you and me, but they're probably running the show: this is the largest data gathering operation since 9/11. Sorry everyone: but the conspiracy is so obviously not, it's nauseating to admit, because you see all your friends, family and co workers dumping so much everyday data into these services. | |
| ▲ | bflesch 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | |
| ▲ | chinathrow 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Propaganda IPO incoming. | |
| ▲ | micromacrofoot 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | the NSA isn't a bunch of super soldiers, they're cops with too much access, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart a cop | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >they're cops with too much access, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart a cop the nsa has an unlimited budget and spend a good portion of that budget recruiting some of the smartest people in the country. while they dont have super powers, they also arent the town cop who took a 6 month course after high school then joined the force. it does no good to hold them up as mythical figures. it also does no good to pretend they are bumbling idiots. (every math phd i am acquainted with has been approached by nsa recruiters. none of them have been approached by police agencies.) | | |
| ▲ | kelnos 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > the nsa has an unlimited budget No they don't, and if you're going to try to argue something with that as your opener, it very easily casts large amounts of skepticism on whatever you are about to say. Perhaps you're exaggerating for effect, but that also undermines your point. | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >No they don't, and if you're going to try to argue something with that as your opener, it very easily casts large amounts of skepticism on whatever you are about to say. if you read my comment like we're having a normal conversation instead of a thesis defense, you'll get my point just fine. |
| |
| ▲ | schoen 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I appreciate the balance here. Some of the smartest people I know have worked on fighting NSA, but they had a drastically smaller budget than NSA itself, and the mental availability bias is skewed by the fact that the "fighting NSA" people talked about their work all the time, while the "being NSA" people generally didn't. I do know one extremely smart person who went to work there, and I witnessed a failed recruitment of another extremely smart person. | |
| ▲ | micromacrofoot 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > every math phd i am acquainted with has been approached by nsa recruiters. how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles? it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop, which at the end of the day is a government job... the only people they make rich are contractors I'm not saying there aren't smart people working there but it's ridiculous to assume they have an iron grasp on all communication from the top tech companies in the world, while also monitoring half the world's governments... they just don't | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles? this is not really relevant to the point, but to satisfy your curiosity: more than one, and one. >it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop the nsa's brightest aren't doing "cop" things. certainly none of the people i know of working there are "cop-minded" in any sense. they are doing cool research and application things. otherwise they wouldn't be able to entice the phds to stick around. these are people that want to work at the forefront of their field, doing interesting work, and the nsa is one avenue of doing that (with good job security, benefits, etc.). >it's ridiculous to assume they have an iron grasp on all communication from the top tech companies in the world, while also monitoring half the world's governments we agree here. they are certainly doing "HNDL" (harvest now, decrypt later) at a very large scale. but obviously they are not able to collect and store every piece of communication at every tech company over years and years. (the intelligence community comprehensive national cybersecurity initiative data center is large, but not that large) | | |
| ▲ | micromacrofoot 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | all the people working at the cop agency hope they're not doing cop shit, but it's the whole reason the agency exists | |
| ▲ | kelnos 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > this is not really relevant to the point, but to satisfy your curiosity: more than one, and one. What? That's not only relevant to the point, it's incredibly relevant. If the NSA is only able to recruit 2% of the math PhDs they approach, then that's important information. "More than one" is not particularly useful; you seem to be dodging the question because it undermines your argument. | | |
| ▲ | john_strinlai 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >"More than one" is not particularly useful; telling you exactly how many people i know in the NSA is also not particularly useful. i'm one guy. there is no statistically significant information from my answer. >you seem to be dodging the question because it undermines your argument. my "argument" is that there are plenty of smart people in the NSA. that's it. i am confused why that is seemingly so offensive to you that you had to reply twice. |
|
| |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles? In my cohort? Several, and who knows? The recruitment effort is very visible and intense. The US math phd market has been a slow-rolling disaster for over a decade. Everyone who can hack it outside the ivory tower is actively looking for the exits. So why is it surprising that some of them go to work at the NSA? > it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop, which at the end of the day is a government job... the only people they make rich are contractors I don’t think you have context on what math phds are making in entry level positions, post-docs, or adjuncting. I just picked a random entry level NSA role on LinkedIn (doctorate + 0 yrs) and they’re offering solid six digits. There are tenured faculty (post-doc(s) + 5ish yrs) who don’t make that. |
|
| |
| ▲ | distill17801 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Please show me a photo of an NSA car with a light bar on it. They're not cops. |
|
|
