CIA hackers spotted a technique to break into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages immediately, until the communication may be encoded by the apps sending them, as stated by the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps similar to Signal have rised since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence professionals have linked the spike to popular worry among activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump could use the nation”s intelligence apparatus to target 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 apps and Signal like it are 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 having the key.
But in accordance with the leaked documents, the CIA appears to have bypassed this obstacle by hacking the phones used to send messages or make calls. Hackers that get access to a device’s operating system might manage 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 suggested 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 the 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 alone. The data dump provided a detailed list of attacks the CIA had used to access 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 details about zero days it discovers and vulnerabilities. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known.
The agreement has been long denounced by critics for being opaque and difficult to enforce, while allowing the government unchecked authority to decide when to keep information that will compromise millions of devices to itself.
The CIA cache published by WikiLeaks seems to validate these concerns, experts point to a need for greater information sharing between tech companies and government agencies, and said.
“If there’s a vulnerability in the wild and it’s not making it into the hands of the vendor so it may be resolved, something is broken,” Rice said. “This ultimately strains tech companies’ relationship with the U.S. government.”
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