CIA hackers found a means to get into smartphones and read – or listen – to messages immediately, before the communication may be encoded by the apps transmitting them, based on the documents.
Downloads of encrypted messaging apps like Signal have spiked since Donald Trump won the presidency in November. Intelligence specialists have assigned the spike to popular concern between activists, whistle-blowers, journalists and marginalized communities about how Trump might 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 they believed secure may not be.
But Moxie Marlinspike, creator of Open Whisper Systems, said, if anything, the data show that Signal and apps like it are working.
“End-to-end encryption has pushed intelligence agencies from unfettered access to mass surveillance to a world where they need to 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 risk of detection. So to break into people’s phones and get access to encrypted messages, these agencies now need to be very selective. I think that’s a good thing.”
Because end-to-end encryption means that the people have the keys to unlock the scrambled message they are sharing would be unable to make sense of it without having the key.
But as stated by the leaked documents, the CIA appears to have bypassed this obstacle by hacking the phones used to send messages or make calls. Hackers who gain access to a device’s operating system might have the ability to record calls and messages in real time, as a person is speaking in their microphone or typing on their keyboard – before the message is actually sent.
“Once you have 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 experts suggested that people continue to encrypt their communication and use apps like WhatsApp and Signal to do so.
“The worst thing which could 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 holds 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 immediately clear how many zero-day vulnerabilities were revealed Tuesday, 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 comprehensive list of attacks the CIA had used to gain access to Android and Apple devices, including several mentions of malicious software that the government appears to have purchased.
For years, technology companies have asked the government to give over information on vulnerabilities and zero days it discovers. Under the Obama administration, the White House issued a compromise known.
Critics have denounced the agreement for being opaque and difficult to enforce, while allowing the government unchecked authority to decide when to keep information that may 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 government agencies and tech companies, and said.
“If there is 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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