Under Rule 41 FBI Can Search Computers Remotely

 

 

A law was passed as of Dec. 1, 2016 allowing Federal agents an even greater scope for spying on computers belonging to regular citizens, thanks to a controversial amendment.

The long-standing Rule 41 governs how the FBI can search and seize property thought to be involved with crime. Its most recent amendment expands the search remit to include remote access of computers whose locations have been “concealed through technological means.”

the FBI can now obtain a warrant to hack any device whose IP address is masked. This can include computers using a virtual proxy network (VPN), a common internet tool used to maintain privacy on public Wi-Fi networks, to watch Netflix (and other geo-restricted media) from another country, to improve streaming speeds or simply to remain anonymous online. Similarly vulnerable under the updated rule are computers running the Tor browser, which users use for privacy and security or to browse the Deep Web for reasons including visiting illegal sites and accessing secured communications for political dissidents and whistle-blowers.

The amendment also makes it legal to search computers that have been “damaged without authorization” — that is, subjected to malware such as hijacking into botnets used to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Considering that 16 million American households experienced serious virus problems in the past two years, that’s a lot of computers that the FBI could legally hack.

“This unprecedented increase in government hacking authority gives the government ability to more easily infiltrate, monitor, copy data from, inject malware into and otherwise damage computers, including victims of a crime, remotely,” said Nate Cardozo, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Under the new Rule 41, any computer with a hidden IP address or location can be included in the scope of a search warrant. Warrants can be granted in any jurisdiction and used to search multiple location-masking computers anywhere.

New Firefox Exploit Can Expose Tor Users

The exploit was delivered through a Tor mailing list that when opened could unveil the MAC address and possibly even the IP address of a user running Tor Browser on Firefox. Researcher Joshua Yabut said it is “100 percent effective for remote code execution on Windows systems, versions 41 to 50 of Firefox are reportedly affected.”

A representative of Mozilla said officials are aware of the vulnerability and are working on a fix. While the vulnerability was already being actively exploited, the publication of the complete source code now puts it in the hands of a much wider base of people. Until a patch is available, Firefox users should use an alternate browser whenever possible, or disable JavaScript on as many sites as possible. People should avoid relying on Tor in cases where deanonymizing attacks could pose a significant threat. Tor users can also disable JavaScript, but turning it off goes against the official Tor recommendations.

Google’s Tor Enabled Smartphone

The Tor Project has announced the release of its prototype for a Tor-enabled smartphone—an Android phone complete with privacy and security in mind.

 Tor developer Mike Perry who designed the phone, says they are trying to demonstrate that it is possible to build a phone that respects user choice and freedom, vastly reduces vulnerability surface, and sets a direction for the ecosystem with respect to how to meet the needs of high-security users. To protect user privacy, the prototype runs OrWall, the Android firewall that routes traffic over Tor, and blocks all other traffic. Users can punch a hole through the firewall for voice traffic, for instance, to enable Signal

The prototype called “Mission Improbable,” is now ready to download and install only works on Google Nexus and Pixel hardware.

Turkish Internet Users Running To Tor

Turkish internet users are flocking to Tor, the anonymizing and censorship-circumvention tool, after Turkey’s government block Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Usage of Tor inside of Turkey went up from around 18,000 users to 25,000 users on Friday, when the government started blocking the popular social media networks, according to Tor’s official metrics.  The Turkish information technologies and communications authority, or BTK, ordered internet providers in the country to block Tor and several other censorship-circumvention Virtual Private Networks or VPNs, such as VPN Master, Hotspot Shield

A Warrant For A Tor User?

The past few months, judges, defense lawyers, and the government have been fighting over whether obtaining a Tor user’s real IP address, perhaps through hacking, counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment. The debate has serious consequences for whether law enforcement requires a warrant to break into a suspect’s computer, even if it’s only to learn the target’s IP address. US District Court Judge Robert W Pratt argued that when the FBI hacked suspected Playpen users and grabbed their IP addresses, that constituted a search.

He stated “If a defendant writes his IP address on a piece of paper and places it in a drawer in his home, there would be no question that law enforcement would need a warrant to access that piece of paper—even accepting that the defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the IP address itself,” Pratt writes in his order. Judges are divided over whether obtaining the IP addresses in this way constitutes a search, and whether Tor users have a reasonable expectation of privacy around their real IP address.

Riffle- More Secure Anonymity Than TOR

A team of researchers led by MIT grad student Albert Kwon (with help from EPFL) aims to leapfrog Tor’s anonymizing technique with a brand new platform called Riffle.

Tor — has prompted computer scientists to try to come up with more secure anonymity schemes. At the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne will present a new anonymity scheme that provides strong security guarantees but uses bandwidth much more efficiently than its predecessors.

The system is devised by Albert Kwon and his coauthors — his advisor, Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT; David Lazar, also a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science; and Bryan Ford SM ’02 PhD ’08, an associate professor of computer and communication sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne — employs several existing cryptographic techniques but combines them in a novel manner.

The system is a series of servers called a mixnet. Each server permutes the order in which it receives messages before passing them on to the next. If, for instance, messages from senders Alice, Bob, and Carol reach the first server in the order A, B, C, that server would send them to the second server in a different order — say, C, B, A. The second server would permute them before sending them to the third, and so on. An adversary that had tracked the messages’ points of origin would have no idea which was which by the time they exited the last server. It’s this reshuffling of the messages that gives the new system its name: Riffle. Riffle also uses a technique known as onion encryption; “Tor,” for instance, is an acronym for “the onion router.” With onion encryption, the sending computer wraps each message in several layers of encryption, using a public-key encryption system like those that safeguard most financial transactions online. Each server in the mixnet removes only one layer of encryption, so that only the last server knows a message’s ultimate destination.

To thwart message tampering, Riffle uses a technique called a verifiable shuffle. Because of the onion encryption, the messages that each server forwards look nothing like the ones it receives; it has peeled off a layer of encryption. But the encryption can be done in such a way that the server can generate a mathematical proof that the messages it sends are valid manipulations of the ones it receives. Mixnets has been around for awhile, but unfortunately it’s always relied on public-key cryptography and on public-key techniques, and has been expensive. Whats different about this research is that it reveals how to  use more efficient symmetric-key techniques to accomplish the same thing. They do one expensive shuffle using known protocols, but then they bootstrap off of that to enable many subsequent shufflings.

 

There’s no plan to commercialize Riffle, either, nor will it be a replacement for Tor, even though it does some things vastly better.

Tiny New Hampshire Library Fights Government Surveillence

A tiny  library in New Hampshire promotes privacy and fights government surveillance—to the dismay of law enforcement.

 The Kilton Public Library in Lebanon NH, a city of 13,000, last year became the nation’s first library to use Tor, software that masks the location and identity of internet users, in a pilot project initiated by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Library Freedom Project. Users the world can have their searches randomly routed through the library.

Computers that have Tor loaded on them bounce internet searches through a random pathway, or series of relays, of other computers equipped with Tor. This network of virtual tunnels masks the location and internet protocol address of the person doing the search.

What makes the Kilton  Public Library unique among  other U.S. libraries, it also has a computer with a Tor exit relay, which delivers the internet query to the destination site and becomes identified as the last-known source of the query.

Founder & Director of the Library Freedom Project, said her organization chose Kilton for its pilot project because it had embraced other privacy-enhancing software the project recommended and because she knew the library had the know-how take it to the complicated exit-relay stage.

What can Tor Do?

Protect shoppers, victims of domestic violence, whistleblowers, dissidents, undercover agents—and criminals—alike. A recent routine internet search using Tor on one of Kilton’s computers was routed through Ukraine, Germany, and the Netherlands

The Tor Project is funded largely by the U.S. State Department and other federal agencies, yet the Department of Homeland Security rejects the idea of its use by civilians because it can be used to mask criminal activity.

Local police, at the behest of Homeland Security’s Boston bureau, asked the Kilton library last July to stop using Tor. Its use was suspended until the library board voted unanimously at a standing-room-only meeting in September to maintain the Tor relay.

 

Tor’s Developer Steps Down After Allegations

Jacob Appelbaum, has stepped down in response to what it called “public allegations of sexual mistreatment.” Tor is free software that channels internet traffic through a series of relays to anonymize its users. In addition to his security research at the Tor Project, Appelbaum is a journalist who worked on WikiLeaks and the Edward Snowden disclosures.

Rolling Stone dubbed him the “public face of the Tor Project” in a 2010 profile that detailed his involvement with Tor and WikiLeaks.

Tor Project executive director Shari Steele provided a statement . Alison Macrina, the founder of The Library Freedom Project, also referenced the allegations on Twitter, saying she had spoken to several victims. The Library Freedom Project is an organization that educates librarians about privacy and collaborates with the Tor Project to establish Tor exit nodes in libraries. “no more open secrets, no more missing stairs. you’re not alone. you were never alone. and I’m pretty sure things are just getting started,” Macrina tweeted.

 Appelbaum posted a response to the allegations against him on Twitter, saying they are part of a “calculated and targeted attack” intended to undermine his advocacy work.

Appelbaum suggested that he would sue his accusers if necessary to clear his name, calling the allegations libelous. His full statement is here

Cloud Computing Security and Privacy

The Question:  Should  the  authorities  be allowed to use unlawful measures, such as hacking, in order to apprehend those who are doing so for financial gain?

We hear stories of Silk Road being shut down and the F.B.I arresting  Ross Ulbricht as a result of unlawful activity. Silk Road was able to exist and function through the use of ‘darknet’ and ‘Tor’. Darknet uses peer-to-peer networks in order to remain anonymous, and Tor (aka The Onion Router) uses separate servers in order to disguise users online presence and location.

The paper trail that would normally accumulate during sales of over $1.2 billion to a million customers was hidden by the use of a virtual currency system called ‘bitcoin’. Bitcoin covered the financial tracks that are often left by credit card use online. The FBI discovered the six servers hidden in various locations around the world. These servers provided the data that exposed transactions, enabled the site to be shutdown, as well as the arrest of Ulbricht.