CIA hackers found out a way to get into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages in real time, before the transmission could be encoded by the apps transferring them, based on the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps similar to Signal have spiked since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence professionals have assigned the spike to widespread concern between activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump would use the nation”s intelligence apparatus to target them.
On Tuesday, many took to social media to fret over the extent to which messaging apps that they believed secure may not be.
But Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Open Whisper Systems, said, if anything, the data show that apps and Signal 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 danger 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 only the people have the keys to unlock the scrambled message they’re sharing would be unable to understand it without the key.
But based on the leaked documents, the CIA appears to get bypassed this obstacle by hacking. Hackers which get access to a device’s operating system could be able to record calls and messages in real time, 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 advised that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like Signal and WhatsApp to do so.
“The worst thing that may 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 keeps 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 though WikiLeaks wrote in a news release accompanying the leak that 24 such vulnerabilities were included by the data for Android devices. The data dump included a detailed list of attacks the CIA had used to get access to Apple and Android devices, including several mentions of malicious software that the government appears to have purchased.
For years, technology companies have asked the government to hand over information about zero days it discovers and vulnerabilities. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known.
For being opaque and difficult to enforce, while allowing the government unchecked authority to decide when to keep information that could compromise millions of devices to itself, critics have long denounced the agreement.
The CIA cache 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’s not making it into the hands of the vendor so that it may be resolved, something is broken,” Rice said. “This ultimately strains tech companies’ relationship with the U.S. government.”
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