Obama’s motorcade ran into some problems in Dublin.
I hope this turns into a new Guinness advertisement. You knew it was good for you, but did you know a few pints also could break the axle on an armoured presidential limo?
Speaking of theatre, you can drive anywhere you want in America with a fake motorcade…authentication implied, authorisation granted even to run red lights. You just have to avoid the “sleeping policemen“.
Excellent research in a paper and presentation from the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy: “Phonotactic Reconstruction of Encrypted VoIP Conversations: Hookt on fon-iks”
Encryption of voice conversations on IP networks does not sufficiently obscure it to prevent reconstruction. It essentially applies the way our brains process spoken language to the sounds of an encrypted VoIP channel. We hear sounds that resemble those in our memory, and then we pattern match (e.g. search for collisions). The patterns can still be found even in encrypted VoIP.
The study has numerous references to related works and there have even been similar presentations at the IEEE but this one emphasises that it is a proof — attacks are far easier than previously thought.
In this work, we make no such assumption about a priori knowledge of target phrases. Rather, our ultimate goal is to reconstruct a hypothesized transcript of the conversation from the bottom up: our approach segments the observed sequence of packets into
subsequences corresponding to individual phonemes (i.e., the basic units of speech).
This illustration of the problem is superb:
Color me impressed. Great adaptation of linguistics to information security. However, they only propose two mitigation options:
…a knee-jerk reaction to thwarting this and other aforementioned threats to VoIP is to simply use constant bit-rate codecs or block ciphers. […] Another alternative might even be to drop or pad packets…
I wonder why they did not mention mixing an entire stream of noise/data into the payload, like a salt in a hash. Maybe that’s what is meant by pad packets? The goal would be to at least fill gaps and obscure phrasing to eavesdroppers, such as techniques used in WWII to hide the increase in radio traffic before attacks were launched. Yet that kind of pad defence is different in my mind from actively sending fake data that hostile recipients would want to process instead of ignore (e.g. communication by the Aspidistra high-power (600 kW) medium wave broadcasting transmitter to confuse German attacks).
Latency in encoding and decoding a message is usually cited as an obstacle for filling gaps and running interference to obscure IP communications, but if someone needs the privacy then a short delay or echo on a call seems like a small price to pay and bandwidth/memory/processing is getting less expensive all the time.
Only five short of a baker’s dozen, there are eight roles provided in Director of Central Intelligence Directive (DCID) 6/3 “Protecting Sensitive Compartmented Information Within Information Systems”.
They provide a good exercise in defining relationships with compartmentalised information; it’s fun to try and make a diagram that shows the connections and overlap.
DCID 6/3 in 1999 superseded DCID 1/16, which had the much more fun title of “Security Policy for Uniform Protection of Intelligence Processed in Automated Information Systems and Networks“.
DCID 1/16 was from 1988 and superseded DCID 1/16 of 1983 — a time of great US government concern about outsider attacks and NSA’s first attempt to wrestle control of the Internet away from NIST.
Twelve officers from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office have been arrested. Three are named:
…Deputy Sheriff Alfredo Navarrette, Detention Officer Silvia Rios-Najera, and Detention Officer Marcella Hernandez, all ICE-trained officers.
They are accused of tipping off drug traffickers and human smugglers about ongoing investigations.
Hernandez allegedly had an ongoing personal relationship with a major drug kingpin and was 8-months pregnant with his child. According to court documents, she arranged the transfer of multiple heroin loads and allowed her boyfriend’s drug trafficking organization to use her two houses as stash houses.
Perhaps the most shocking revelation is that Navarrette used to work in the anti-human smuggling unit for a short time, and when officers raided his house, they found two illegal immigrants being housed inside.
Two of the three were charged with use of electronic communication in drug related transactions.