Category: Writing

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Links Writing

American Telecommunication Companies’ Cybersecurity Deficiencies Increasingly Apparent

Five Eyes countries have regularly and routinely sought, and gained, access to foreign telecommunications infrastructures to carry out their operations. The same is true of other well resourced countries, including China.

Salt Typhoon’s penetration of American telecommunications and email platforms is slowly coming into relief. The New York Times has an article that summarizes what is being publicly disclosed at this point in time:

  • The full list of phone numbers that the Department of Justice had under surveillance in lawful interception systems has been exposed, with the effect of likely undermining American counter-intelligence operations aimed at Chinese operatives
  • Phone calls, unencrypted SMS messages, and email providers have been compromised
  • The FBI has heightened concerns that informants may have been exposed
  • Apple’s services, as well as end to end encrypted systems, were not penetrated

American telecommunications networks were penetrated, in part, due to companies relying on decades old systems and equipment that do not meet modern security requirements. Fixing these deficiencies may require rip-and-replacing some old parts of the network with the effect of creating “painful network outages for consumers.” Some of the targeting of American telecommunications networks is driven by an understanding that American national security defenders have some restrictions on how they can operate on American-based systems.

The weaknesses of telecommunications networks and their associated systems are generally well known. And mobile systems are particularly vulnerable to exploitation as a result of archaic standards and an unwillingness by some carriers to activate the security-centric aspects of 4G and 5G standards.

Some of the Five Eyes, led by Canada, have been developing and deploying defensive sensor networks that are meant to shore up some defences of government and select non-government organizations.1 But these edge, network, and cloud based sensors can only do so much: telecommunications providers, themselves, need to prioritize ensuring their core networks are protected against the classes of adversaries trying to penetrate them.2

At the same time, it is worth recognizing that end to end communications continued to be protected even in the face of Salt Typhoon’s actions. This speaks the urgent need to ensure that these forms of communications security continue to be available to all users. We often read that law enforcement needs select access to such communications and that they can be trusted to not abuse such exceptional access.

Setting aside the vast range of legal, normative, or geopolitical implications of weakening end to end encryption, cyber operations like the one perpetrated by Salt Typhoon speak to governments’ collective inabilities to protect their lawful access systems. There’s no reason to believe they’d be any more able to protect exceptional access measures that weakened, or otherwise gained access to, select content of end to end encrypted communications.

  1. I have discussed these sensors elsewhere, including in “Unpacking NSICOP’s Special Report on the Government of Canada’s Framework and Activities to Defend its Systems and Networks from Cyber Attack”. Historical information about these sensors, which were previously referred to under the covernames of CASCADE, EONBLUE, and PHOTONICPRISM, is available at the SIGINT summaries. ↩︎
  2. We are seeing some governments introducing, and sometimes passing, laws that would foster more robust security requirements. In Canada, Bill C-26 is generally meant to do this though the legislation as introduced raised some serious concerns. ↩︎
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Writing

Intelligence Commissioner Raises Concerns About Canada’s Federal Cybersecurity Legislation

Earlier this week the Intelligence Commissioner (IC) appeared at the Standing Senate Committee on National Security, Defence and Veterans Affairs on Bill C-26, along with federal Privacy Commissioner. The bill is intended to enhance the cybersecurity requirements that critical infrastructure providers must adopt.

The IC’s remarks are now public. He made four very notable comments in his opening remarks:

  1. The IC warned that the proposed amendments to the Telecom Act would allow the minister to essentially compel the production of any information in support of orders. This information could include personal information – which under broad exceptions, could then be widely disclosed.
  2. Part 2 allows for the regulators to carry out the equivalent of unwarranted searches – where again, personal information could be collected.
  3. The CSE will play a vital role and will be the holder of this information, in a technological form or otherwise, which will contain elements for which we have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
  4. In light of the invasive nature of the Bill, he asserted that it is important that meaningful safeguards be part of the legislation so that Canadians have confidence in the cybersecurity system.

His responses to comments at committee — not yet available through Hansard — made even more clear that he believed that amendments are needed to integrate appropriate oversight and accountability measures into the legislation. The IC’s comments, combined with those of the federal Privacy Commissioner of Canada and civil society representatives, constitute a clear warning to senators about the potential implications of the legislation.

It will be interesting to see how they respond.

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Links Writing

Emerging Trends from Canadian Privacy Regulators and Cybersecurity Legislation?

Earlier this evening, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) appeared before the Standing Senate Committee on National Security, Defence and Veterans Affairs on the topic of Bill C-26: An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts.

While at Committee, Commissioner Dufresne recognized the value of making explicit the OPC’s oversight role concerning the legislation. He, also, reaffirmed the importance of requiring any collection, use, or disclosure of personal information to be both necessary and proportionate. And should the Standing Committee decline to adopt this amendment they were advised to, at a minimum, include a requirement that data only be retained for as long as necessary. Government institutions should also be required to undertake privacy impact assessments and consult with the OPC.

Finally, in cases of cyber incidents that may result in a material breach, his office should be notified; this could entail the OPC being notified by the Communications Security Establishment based on a real risk of significant harm standard. Information sharing agreements should also be put in place that provide minimum privacy safeguards while also strengthening governance and accountability processes.

The safeguards the OPC are calling for are important and, also, overlap with many of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario’s (written submission, Commissioner Kosseim’s oral remarks) concerning the provincial government’s Bill 194, Strengthening Cyber Security and Building Trust in the Public Sector Act, 2024.

Should other Canadian jurisdictions propose their own cybersecurity legislation to protect critical infrastructure and regulated bodies it will be interesting to monitor for the consistency in the amendments called for by Canada’s privacy regulators.

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Writing

Ongoing Criminal Exploitation of Emergency Data Requests

When people are at risk, law enforcement agencies can often move quickly to obtain certain information from online service providers. In the United States this can involve issuing Emergency Data Requests (EDRs) absent a court order.1

The problem? Criminal groups are increasingly taking advantage of poor cyber hygiene to gain access to government accounts and issue fraudulent EDRs.

While the full extent of the threat remains unknown, of Verizon’s total 127,000 requests for data in Q2 of 2023, 36,000 were EDRs. And Kodex, a company that is often the intermediary between law enforcement and online providers, found that over the past year it had suspended 4,000 law enforcement users and approximately 30% of EDRs did not pass secondary verification. Taken together this may indicate a concerning cyber policy issue that may seriously endanger affected individuals.

These are just some of the broader policy and cybersecurity challenges that are key to keep in mind, both as new laws are passed and as new cybersecurity requirements are contemplated. It is imperative that lawful government capabilities are not transformed into significant and powerful tools for criminals and adversaries alike.

  1. There are similar kinds of provisions in the Canadian Criminal Code. ↩︎
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Links Writing

Significant New Cybersecurity Protections Added in iOS 18.1

Apple has quietly introduced an enhanced security feature in iOS 18.1. If you haven’t authenticated to your device recently — the past few days — the device will automatically revert from the After First Unlock (AFU) state to the Before First Unlock (BFU) state, with the effect of better protecting user information.1

Users may experience this new functionality by sometimes needing to enter their credentials prior to unlocking their device if they haven’t used it recently. The effect is that stolen or lost devices will be returned to a higher state of security and impede unauthorized parties from gaining access to the data that users have stored on their devices.

There is a secondary effect, however, insofar as these protections in iOS 18.1 may impede some mobile device forensics practices when automatically returning seized devices to a higher state of security (i.e., BFU) after a few days. This can reduce the volume of user information that is available to state agencies or other parties with the resources to forensically analyze devices.

While this activity may raise concerns that lawful government investigations may be impaired it is worth recalling that Apple is responsible for protecting devices from around the world. Numerous governments, commercial organizations, and criminal groups are amongst those using mobile device forensics practices, and iOS devices in the hands of a Canadian university student are functionally same as iOS devices used by fortune 50 executives. The result is that all users receive an equivalent high level of security, and all data is strongly safeguarded regardless of a user’s economic, political, or socio-cultural situation.

  1. For more details on the differences between the Before First Unlock (BFU) and After First Unlock (AFU) states, see: https://blogs.dsu.edu/digforce/2023/08/23/bfu-and-afu-lock-states/ ↩︎
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Writing

Sophos Risks Legitimizing Hack Back Activities

Each week is seemingly accompanied by news of some perimeter security appliance being successfully exploited by adversaries. Sophos has produced a report — covered by Wired — which outlines their 5-year efforts to identify and combat such adversaries. It’s a wild read both in terms of the range of activities undertaken by Sophos and for making clearer to the public the range of intelligence activities that private organizations undertake as part of their cybersecurity operations.

Some of the major revelations, and activities undertaken, by Sophos include:

  • A broader group of China-based researchers developed hacking techniques and supplied them to Chinese government APTs.
  • Historically the exploitation of Sophos appliances was being carried out using 0-days but, in recent assessments, APTs are using N-days to target end-of-life equipment.
  • Sophos included code in one of its hotfixes to obtain additional information from consumer devices and expose more information about adversaries to the company.
  • Sophos went to far as to deploy, “its own spy implants to the Sophos devices in Chengdu they were testing on—essentially hacking the hackers, albeit only through code added to a few installations of its own products the hackers had obtained.”
  • Targets of Chinese APTs were often located throughout Asia, and most recently included “another country’s nuclear energy regulatory agency, then a military facility in the same country and the airport of the country’s capital city, as well as other hacking incidents that targeted Tibetan exiles.”
  • Sophos found that the adversaries had built a bootkit which is designed to infect low-level code. The company is asserting this may be the first time a firewall bootkit has ever been seen. They have no intelligence that it has ever been deployed in the wild.

It’s uncommon for the details of how private companies have developed their defensive strategies over a longer period of time to be made public, and so this is helpful for broadening the space for discussion. Sophos’ activities are, also, significant on the basis that the private company implanted its own systems to develop intelligence concerning its Chinese adversaries.

There has been extensive normative and legal discussion on the risks linked with “hacking back” and Sophos’ actions are another step towards normalizing such behaviour, albeit under the auspice of a company targeting its own equipment. I personally don’t think that Sophos’ defence that they were targeting their own equipment meaningfully isolates the broader implications of their actions. Perimeter appliances are extensively deployed and their decision may both normalize such behaviours broadly by private firms for their own ends and, also, further open the doors to some governments pressuring private firms to deploy implants on behalf of said governments. Neither of these trajectories are likely to end well.

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Writing

Some Challenges Facing Physician AI Scribes

Recent reporting from the Associated Press highlights the potential challenges in adopting emergent generative AI technologies into the working world. Their reporting focused on how American health care providers are using OpenAI’s transcription tool, Whisper, to transcribe patients’ conversations with medical staff.

These activities are occurring despite OpenAI’s warnings that Whisper should not be used in high-risk domains.

The article reports that a “machine learning engineer said he initially discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third developer said he found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper. The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study by computer scientists uncovered 187 hallucinations in more than 13,000 clear audio snippets they examined.”

Transcription errors can be very serious. Research by Prof. Koenecke and Prof. Sloane of the University of Virgina found:

… that nearly 40% of the hallucinations were harmful or concerning because the speaker could be misinterpreted or misrepresented.

In an example they uncovered, a speaker said, “He, the boy, was going to, I’m not sure exactly, take the umbrella.”

But the transcription software added: “He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece … I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people.”

A speaker in another recording described “two other girls and one lady.” Whisper invented extra commentary on race, adding “two other girls and one lady, um, which were Black.”

In a third transcription, Whisper invented a non-existent medication called “hyperactivated antibiotics.”

While, in some cases, voice data is deleted for privacy reasons this can impede physicians (or other medical personnel) from double checking the accuracy of transcription. While some may be caught, easily and quickly, more subtle errors or mistakes may be less likely to be caught.

One area where work stills needs to be done is to assess the relative accuracy of the AI scribes versus that of physicians. While there may be errors introduced by automated transcription what is the error rate of physicians? Also, what is the difference in quality of care between one whom is self-transcribing during a meeting vs reviewing transcriptions after the interaction? These are central questions that should play a significant role in assessments of when and how these technologies are deployed.

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Photography Writing

Editing and Viewing Smartphone Images Versus Dedicated Camera Images

Manitoba & Nova Scotia, Toronto, 2023

In 2023, Andrea Bianco wrote a lovely long-form meditation on the difference in practice between excellent smart phone cameras (i.e., iPhone 11 Pro) and excellent compact cameras (i.e., Ricoh GR 2). I appreciated that it wasn’t a “smartphones bad and dedicated cameras good” (or the vice versa) kind of assessment. He, instead, considered the utility and capabilities of both classes of cameras. He often noted how phone cameras were best consumed on smaller screens but that their limitations became more apparent when viewed on larger screens.

His post reminded me of some longer-term considerations I’ve had for the past year about the screens on which we assess the images that we make.

Cherry & Polson, Toronto, 2024

Our camera’s screen size, or viewfinder resolution, has an effect on how we compose images. We may try to squeeze in (or exclude) content based on what we can see. However, the screen on which we edit images also affects how we perceive and present the images we have captured.

Editing on smaller screens, such as those used with phones, can lead to presenting images differently than when editing on a larger tablet or computer monitor screen. A figure that is apparent on a 12” or 24” display and is poignant to the photo editing process may functionally be a near-invisible dot on a 6” phone screen.

Eireann Quay & Queens Quay, Toronto, 2024

How we see when editing images, then, will often affect the images which are produced using dedicated cameras by merit of photographers often editing them on larger tablet or laptop screens. By editing on these larger screens we will often make very different editorial or cropping decisions based (in part) on the sheer size of the screen we are reviewing and editing photographs on. The size of the screen (and its quality) affects how we read and interpret our own photographs.

Queen & Bay, Toronto, 2019

The effects of screen size then expand, further, when we consider what screens we use to view other photographers’ work, and correspondingly lead to very different perceptions of work that photographers are digitally displaying. If a photographer edits all their work on a display of 11” or greater, should we not view it with the same size screen to truly read what they are communicating? And, by way of contrast, if a photographer’s photos are all edited on a smartphone then should we view them primarily at the size of a phone? And either way, shouldn’t we view other photographers’ work at peak screen brightness?

Of course we will all use a variety of different screens, of different sizes and luminosity and quality, to look at one another’s work. But because we are both unaware of one another’s editing and viewing defaults it is imperative to think carefully when looking at photographers’ works and ask ourselves: “Do I have the same equipment as they do, to approximate an attempt to see the photograph and scene as they intended for it to be viewed?”

Note: Updated to correctly refer to Andrea’s gender. Apologies!

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Links Writing

Encryption Use Hits a New Height in Canada

In a continuing demonstration of the importance of strong and privacy-protective communications, the federal Foreign Interference Commission has created a Signal account to receive confidential information.

Encrypted Messaging
For those who may feel more comfortable providing information to the Commission using encrypted means, they may do so through the Signal – Private Messenger app. Those who already have a Signal account can contact the Commission using our username below. Others will have to first download the app and set up an account before they can communicate with the Commission.

The Commission’s Signal Username is signal_pifi_epie20.24

Signal users can also scan QR Code below for the Commission’s username:

The Commission has put strict measures in place to protect the confidentiality of any information provided through this Signal account.

Not so long ago, the Government of Canada was arguing for an irresponsible encryption policy that included the ability to backdoor end-to-end encryption. It’s hard to overstate the significance of a government body now explicitly adopting Signal.

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Links Writing

The Ongoing Problems of Placing Backdoors in Telecommunications Networks

In a cyber incident reminiscent of Operation Aurora,1 threat actors successfully penetrated American telecommunications companies (and a small number of other countries’ service providers) to gain access to lawful interception systems or associated data. The result was that:

For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.

…

The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.

Not only is this a major intelligence coup for the adversary in question, but it once more reveals the fundamental difficulties in deliberately establishing lawful access/interception systems in communications infrastructures to support law enforcement and national security investigations while, simultaneously, preventing adversaries from taking advantage of the same deliberately-designed communications vulnerabilities.

  1. Or Greece’s 2004 Olympics wiretap scandal. ↩︎