Google's plans to implement DNS over HTTPS in Chrome are being investigated by a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, while the Justice Department has "recently received complaints" about the practice, according to the Wall Street Journal.

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: While Google says it's pushing for adoption of the technology to prevent spying and spoofing, House investigators are worried this would give the internet giant an unfair advantage by denying access to users' data. The House sent a letter on September 13th asking if Google would use data handled through the process for commercial purposes... Internet service providers are worried that they may be shut out of the data and won't know as much about their customers' traffic patterns. This could "foreclose competition in advertising and other industries," an alliance of ISPs told Congress in a September 19th letter...

Mozilla also wants to use the format to secure DNS in Firefox, and the company's Marshall Erwin told the WSJ that the antitrust gripes are "fundamentally misleading." ISPs are trying to undermine the standard simply because they want continued access to users' data, Erwin said. Unencrypted DNS helps them target ads by tracking your web habits, and it's harder to thwart DNS tracking than cookies and other typical approaches.

"Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users' encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, " reports Bloomberg, citing "a person familiar with the matter." The accord, which is set to be signed by next month, will compel social media firms to share information to support investigations into individuals suspected of serious criminal offenses including terrorism and pedophilia, the person said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The voting machines that the U.S. will use in the 2020 election are still vulnerable to hacks. A group of ethical hackers tested a bunch of those voting machines and election systems (most of which they bought on eBay). They were able to crack into every machine, The Washington Post reports. Their tests took place this summer at a Def Con cybersecurity conference, but the group visited Washington to share their findings yesterday. A number of flaws allowed the hackers to access the machines, including weak default passwords and shoddy encryption. The group says the machines could be hacked by anyone with access to them, and if poll workers make mistakes or take shortcuts, the machines could be infiltrated by remote hackers.

A suspected Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been spotted attacking tech companies using a trojanized screen-reader application, replacing the built-in Narrator "Ease of Access" feature in Windows. Threatpost reports: The attackers also deploy a version of the open-source malware known as the PcShare backdoor to gain an initial foothold into victims' systems. Using the two tools, the adversaries are able to surreptitiously control Windows machines via remote desktop logon screens, without the need for credentials.

The attacks begin by delivering the PcShare backdoor to victims via spearphishing campaigns. It has been modified and designed to operate when side-loaded by a legitimate NVIDIA application. It is "specifically tailored to the needs of the campaign, with additional command-and-control (C2) encryption and proxy bypass functionality, and any unused functionality removed from the code," explained researchers with BlackBerry Cylance, in an analysis posted on Wednesday. The unused functionality includes audio/video streaming and keyboard monitoring, suggesting that it's strictly being used to install other malware.

tearmeapart writes (edited to add more details): Cloudflare is opening up its security and speed-focused mobile VPN service called WARP and WARP Plus to the general public. WARP is a mobile app for Android and Apple to establish a VPN to CloudFlare's huge global network. Cloudflare is promising:
1. No user-identifiable log data to disk;
2. No selling browsing data;
3. No need to provide any personal information
4. Regularly get audited. This is the second time Cloudflare is launching Warp. The VPN builds on Cloudflare's existing mobile app 1.1.1.1, which encrypts domain name system connections. But Warp goes beyond this protection to encrypt the whole journey from your device to a web server and back -- even if the website itself still isn't offering HTTPS web encryption. And all of this happens quickly, without draining your battery, and without complicated setup. In an interview with Wired, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said: Yeah, what we thought was going to be easy back in April turned out to be a lot harder than we expected. We had been testing this primarily in San Francisco and Austin and London, which is where the teams that were working on this are based. But as soon as users started to get anywhere that didn't have a fairly reliable internet connection, just all hell broke loose. The report adds: In describing the hurdles Cloudflare faced getting Warp off the ground, John Graham-Cumming, the company's chief technology officer, and Dane Knecht, its head of product strategy, note that many of the challenges came from dealing with interoperability issues between mobile device models, operating system versions, and different mobile network and Wi-Fi configurations around the world. For example, Warp is built on a newer secure communication protocol for VPNs known as WireGuard, which isn't ubiquitous yet and therefore isn't always natively supported by devices. The team also faced challenges dealing with web protocols and standards that are implemented inconsistently across different wireless carriers and internet service providers around the world. Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 focuses on encrypting DNS connections specifically, but Warp aims to encompass everything in one protected tunnel. Keeping everything together as data traverses the labyrinth of servers that make up the internet, including Cloudflare's own massive network, was tough. Warp is free to use without any bandwidth caps or limitations. But Warp Plus, which is being offered through a monthly subscription fee, offers a "faster version of Warp that you can optionally pay for. The fee for Warp Plus varies by region and is designed to approximate what a McDonald's Big Mac would cost in the region. On iOS, the Warp Plus pricing as of the publication of this post is still being adjusted on a regional basis, but that should settle out in the next couple days. Warp Plus uses Cloudflare's virtual private backbone, known as Argo, to achieve higher speeds and ensure your connection is encrypted across the long haul of the Internet. We charge for it because it costs us more to provide," the company said in the blog post.

Android Go has made smartphones more accessible by focusing on lower-cost devices, but it's frequently pokey and sometimes insecure -- not a great introduction to modern mobile tech. Google is aware of this, though, and it's tackling those issues head-on with its newly unveiled Android 10 Go edition. From a report: The scaled-back version of Android 10 puts a strong focus on speed, with faster and more memory-efficient app switching as well as launching that's 10 percent faster than in Android 9 Go. It should be more reliable, too. For some, data protection may be the real star of the show. Android 10 Go edition includes a new Adiantum encryption system that should secure data without affecting performance or requiring special hardware. You won't have to worry that your sensitive info is vulnerable simply because you bought an entry-level device.

Hackers widely believed to work for North Korea's hermit government have developed a new strain of malware that steals data used at automatic teller machines in India, researchers from Kaspersky Lab said on Monday. Ars Technica reports: One piece of malware, dubbed ATMDtrack by researchers with the Moscow-based security firm, has been targeting Indian ATMs since last Summer. It allows its operators to read and store data associated with cards that are inserted into infected ATMs. As researchers with the Moscow-based security firm investigated further, they found that the ATM malware was part of a larger remote-access trojan that carries out traditional espionage activities. Dubbed "Dtrack," it was used as recently as this month to target financial institutions and research centers.

Dtrack payloads were carefully encrypted with utilities known as packers, which made it hard for researchers to forensically analyze the malware. As the researchers analyzed the memory of infected devices, they found that that both ATMDtrack and Dtrack shared unique code sequences. When company researchers peeled away the layers of encryption and began analyzing the final payload, they saw pieces of code that were first used in a 2013 attack that wiped the hard drives of South Korean banks and broadcasters. The campaign, known as DarkSeoul, was eventually tied to Lazarus Group, the main hacking arm of the North Korean government.

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from Phoronix, detailing a new set of systemd capabilities shown off by lead developer Lennart Poettering at the annual All Systems Go conference: Improving the Linux handling of user home directories is the next ambition for systemd. Among the goals are allowing more easily migratable home directories, ensuring all data for users is self-contained to the home directories, UID assignments being handled to the local system, unified user password and encryption key handling, better data encryption handling in general, and other modernization efforts. Among the items being explored by systemd-homed are JSON-based user records, encrypted LUKS home directories in loop-back files, and other next-gen features to offering secure yet portable home directories. Systemd-homed is currently being developed in Lennart's Git tree but hopes to see it merged for either systemd 244 (the current cycle) or systemd 245.

The FBI tried to force the owner of an encrypted phone company to put a backdoor in his devices, Motherboard has learned. From the report: The company involved is Phantom Secure, a firm that sold privacy-focused BlackBerry phones and which ended up catering heavily to the criminal market, including members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, formerly run by JoaquÃn "El Chapo" Guzman. The news signals some of the tactics law enforcement may use as criminals continue to leverage encrypted communications for their own ends. It also comes as Canadian media reported that a former top official in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who has been charged with leaking state secrets, offered to sell information to Vincent Ramos, Phantom's CEO.

"He was given the opportunity to do significantly less time if he identified users or built in/gave backdoor access," one source who knows Ramos personally and has spoken with him about the issue after his arrest told Motherboard. A backdoor is a general term for some form of technical measure that grants another party, in this case the FBI, surreptitious access to a computer system. What exactly the FBI was technically after is unclear, but the desire for a backdoor was likely to monitor Phantom's clients.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late 2011, Intel introduced a performance enhancement to its line of server processors that allowed network cards and other peripherals to connect directly to a CPU's last-level cache, rather than following the standard (and significantly longer) path through the server's main memory. By avoiding system memory, Intel's DDIO -- short for Data-Direct I/O -- increased input/output bandwidth and reduced latency and power consumption.

Now, researchers are warning that, in certain scenarios, attackers can abuse DDIO to obtain keystrokes and possibly other types of sensitive data that flow through the memory of vulnerable servers. The most serious form of attack can take place in data centers and cloud environments that have both DDIO and remote direct memory access enabled to allow servers to exchange data. A server leased by a malicious hacker could abuse the vulnerability to attack other customers. To prove their point, the researchers devised an attack that allows a server to steal keystrokes typed into the protected SSH (or secure shell session) established between another server and an application server. "The researchers have named their attack NetCAT, short for Network Cache ATtack," the report adds. "Their research is prompting an advisory for Intel that effectively recommends turning off either DDIO or RDMA in untrusted networks."

"The researchers say future attacks may be able to steal other types of data, possibly even when RDMA isn't enabled. They are also advising hardware makers do a better job of securing microarchitectural enhancements before putting them into billions of real-world servers." The researchers published their paper about NetCAT on Tuesday.

This month Firefox will make DNS over encrypted HTTPS the default for the U.S., with a gradual roll-out starting in late September, reports Engadget: Your online habits should be that much more private and secure, with fewer chances for DNS hijacking and activity monitoring.

Not every request will use HTTPS. Mozilla is relying on a "fallback" method that will revert to your operating system's default DNS if there's either a specific need for them (such as some parental controls and enterprise configurations) or an outright lookup failure. This should respect the choices of users and IT managers who need the feature turned off, Mozilla said. The team is watching out for potential abuses, though, and will "revisit" its approach if attackers use a canary domain to disable the technology.
Users will be given the option to opt-out, explains Mozilla's official announcement. "After many experiments, we've demonstrated that we have a reliable service whose performance is good, that we can detect and mitigate key deployment problems, and that most of our users will benefit from the greater protections of encrypted DNS traffic."

"We feel confident that enabling DNS-over-HTTPS by default is the right next step."

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? With a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn't use the internet.

That's exactly what Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are doing now, thanks to San Francisco startup Bridgefy's Bluetooth-based messaging app. The protesters can communicate with each other — and the public — using no persistent managed network...

While you can chat privately with contacts, you can also broadcast to anyone within range, even if they are not a contact.

That's clearly an ideal scenario for protesters who are trying to reach people but cannot use traditional SMS texting, email, or the undisputed uber-app of China: WeChat. All of them are monitored by the state.
Wednesday another article in Forbes confirmed with Bridgefy that their app uses end-to-end RSA encryption -- though an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute warns in the same article about the possibility of the Chinese government demanding that telecom providers hand over a list of all users running the app and where they're located.

Forbes also notes that "police could sign up to Bridgefy and, at the very least, cause confusion by flooding the network with fake broadcasts" -- or even use the app to spread privacy-compromising malware. "But if they're willing to accept the risk, Bridgefy could remain a useful tool for communicating and organizing in extreme situations."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A French security researcher has found a critical vulnerability in the blockchain-based voting system Russian officials plan to use next month for the 2019 Moscow City Duma election. Pierrick Gaudry, an academic at Lorraine University and a researcher for INRIA, the French research institute for digital sciences, found that he could compute the voting system's private keys based on its public keys. This private keys are used together with the public keys to encrypt user votes cast in the election. Gaudry blamed the issue on Russian officials using a variant of the ElGamal encryption scheme that used encryption key sizes that were too small to be secure. This meant that modern computers could break the encryption scheme within minutes.

What an attacker can do with these encryption keys is currently unknown, since the voting system's protocols weren't yet available in English, so Gaudry couldn't investigate further. "Without having read the protocol, it is hard to tell precisely the consequences, because, although we believe that this weak encryption scheme is used to encrypt the ballots, it is unclear how easy it is for an attacker to have the correspondence between the ballots and the voters," the French researcher said. "In the worst case scenario, the votes of all the voters using this system would be revealed to anyone as soon as they cast their vote." The Moscow Department of Information Technology promised to fix the reported issue. "We absolutely agree that 256x3 private key length is not secure enough," a spokesperson said in an online response. "This implementation was used only in a trial period. In few days the key's length will be changed to 1024."

However, a public key of a length of 1024 bits may not be enough, according to Gaudry, who believes officials should use one of at least 2048 bits instead.

Google has made a proposal to the unofficial cert industry group that "would cut lifespan of SSL certificates from 825 days to 397 days," reports ZDNet. No vote was held on the proposal; however, most browser vendors expressed their support for the new SSL certificate lifespan. On the other side, certificate authorities were not too happy, to say the least. In the last decade and a half, browser makers have chipped away at the lifespan of SSL certificates, cutting it down from eight years to five, then to three, and then to two. The last change occured in March 2018, when browser makers tried to reduce SSL certificate lifespans from three years to one, but compromised for two years after pushback from certificate authorities. Now, barely two years later after the last change, certificate authorities feel bullied by browser makers into accepting their original plan, regardless of the 2018 vote...

This fight between CAs and browser makers has been happening in the shadows for years. As HashedOut, a blog dedicated to HTTPS-related news, points out, this proposal is much more about proving who controls the HTTPS landscape than everything. "If the CAs vote this measure down, there's a chance the browsers could act unilaterally and just force the change anyway," HashedOut said. "That's not without precendent, but it's also never happened on an issue that is traditionally as collegial as this. "If it does, it becomes fair to ask what the point of the CA/B Forum even is. Because at that point the browsers would basically be ruling by decree and the entire exercise would just be a farce."
Security researcher Scott Helme "claims that this process is broken and that bad SSL certificates continue to live on for years after being mississued and revoked -- hence the reason he argued way back in early 2018 that a shorter lifespan for SSL certificates would fix this problem because bad SSL certs would be phased out faster."

But the article also notes that Timothy Hollebeek, DigiCert's representative at the CA/B Forum argues that the proposed change "has absolutely no effect on malicious websites, which operate for very short time periods, from a few days to a week or two at most. After that, the domain has been added to various blacklists, and the attacker moves on to a new domain and acquires new certificates."

An anonymous reader quotes MSPoweruser: Google Chrome always had a bit of a love-hate relationship when it comes to managing FTP links. The web browser usually downloads instead of rendering it like other web browsers. However, if you're using FTP then you might have to look elsewhere soon as Google is planning to remove FTP support altogether.

In a post (via Techdows), Google, today announced its intention to deprecate FTP support starting with Chrome v80. The main issue with FTP right now is security and the protocol doesn't support encryption which makes it vulnerable and Google has decided it's no longer feasible to support it.

A new Bluetooth vulnerability named "KNOB" has been disclosed that allow attackers to more easily brute force the encryption key used during pairing to monitor or manipulate the data transferred between two paired devices. From a report: In a coordinated disclosure between Center for IT-Security, Privacy and Accountability (CISPA), ICASI, and ICASI members such as Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Cisco, and Amazon, a new vulnerability called "KNOB" has been disclosed that affects Bluetooth BR/EDR devices, otherwise known as Bluetooth Classic, using specification versions 1.0 - 5.1. This flaw has been assigned CVE ID CVE-2019-9506 and allows an attacker to reduce the length of the encryption key used for establishing a connection. In some cases, an attacker could reduce the length of an encryption key to a single octet.

"The researchers identified that it is possible for an attacking device to interfere with the procedure used to set up encryption on a BR/EDR connection between two devices in such a way as to reduce the length of the encryption key used," stated an advisory on Bluetooth.com. "In addition, since not all Bluetooth specifications mandate a minimum encryption key length, it is possible that some vendors may have developed Bluetooth products where the length of the encryption key used on a BR/EDR connection could be set by an attacking device down to a single octet."

Rob Enderle reports on the excitement at AMD's Epyc processor launch in San Francisco: I've been at a lot of AMD events, and up until this one, the general message was that AMD was almost as good as Intel but not as expensive. This year it is very different; Intel has stumbled badly, and AMD is moving to take the leadership role in the data center, so its message isn't that it is nearly as good but cheaper anymore; it is that it has better customer focus, better security and better performance. Intel's slip really was around trust, and as Intel seemed to abandon the processor segment, OEMs and customers lost faith, and AMD is capitalizing on that slip...

AMD has always been relatively conservative, but Lisa Su, AMD's CEO, stated that the company has broken 80 performance records and that this new processor is the highest-performing one in the segment. This is one thing Lisa's IBM training helps validate; I went through that training myself and, at IBM, you aren't allowed to make false claims. AMD isn't making a false claim here. The new Epyc 2 is 64 cores and 128 threads and with PCIe generation 4, it has 128 lanes on top its 7nm technology, which currently also appears to lead the market. Over the years the average performance for the data center chips, according to Su, has improved around 15% per year. The last generation of Epyc exceeded this when it launched, but just slightly. This new generation blows the curve out; instead of 15% year-over-year improvement, it is closer to 100%...

Intel has had a number of dire security problems that it didn't disclose in timely fashion, making their largest customers very nervous. AMD is going after this vulnerability aggressively and pointing to how they've uniquely hardened Epyc 2 so that customers that use it have few, if any, of the concerns they've had surrounding Intel parts. Part of this is jumping to more than 500 unique encryption keys tied to the platform.
Besides Google and Twitter, AMD's event also included announcements from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Dell, Cray, Lenovo, and Microsoft Azure. For example, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has three systems immediately available with AMD's new processor, the article reports, with plan to have 9 more within the next 12 months. And their CTO told the audience that their new systems have already broken 37 world performance records, and "attested to the fact that some of the most powerful supercomputers coming to market will use this processor, because it is higher performing," calling them the most secure in the industry and the highest-performing.

"AMD came to play in San Francisco this week," Enderle writes. "I've never seen it go after Intel this aggressively and, to be frank, this would have failed had it not been for the massive third-party advocacy behind Epyc 2. I've been in this business since the mid-'80s, and I've never seen this level of advocacy for a new processor ever before. And it was critical that AMD set this new bar; I guess this was an extra record they set, but AMD can legitimately argue that it is the new market leader, at least in terms of both raw and price performance, in the HPC in the server segment.

"I think this also showcases how badly Intel is bleeding support after abandoning the IDF (Intel Developer Forum) conference."

Kazakhstan has halted the implementation of an internet surveillance system criticized by lawyers as illegal, with the government describing its initial rollout as a test. From a report: Mobile phone operators in the oil-rich Central Asian nation's capital, Nur-Sultan, had asked customers to install an encryption certificate on their devices or risk losing internet access. State security officials said its goal was to protect Kazakh users from "hacker attacks, online fraud and other kinds of cyber threats." The certificate allowed users' traffic to be intercepted by the government, circumventing encryption used by email and messaging applications. Several Kazakh lawyers said this week they had sued the country's three mobile operators, arguing that restricting internet access to those who refused to install the certificate would be illegal. But late on Tuesday, Kazakhstan's State Security Committee said in a statement that the certificate rollout was simply a test which has now been completed. Users can remove the certificate and use internet as usual, it said.

On Friday technologist Bruce Schneier wrote that after reviewing responses from WhatsApp, he's concluded that reports of a pre-encryption backdoor are a false alarm. He also says he got an equally strong confirmation from WhatsApp's Privacy Policy Manager Nate Cardozo, who Facebook hired last December from the EFF. "He basically leveraged his historical reputation to assure me that WhatsApp, and Facebook in general, would never do something like this."

Schneier has also added the words "This story is wrong" to his original blog post. "The only source for that post was a Forbes essay by Kalev Leetaru, which links to a previous Forbes essay by him, which links to a video presentation from a Facebook developers conference." But that Forbes contributor has also responded, saying that he'd first asked Facebook three times about when they'd deploy the backdoor in WhatsApp -- and never received a response.

Asked again on July 25th the company's plans for "moderating end to end encrypted conversations such as WhatsApp by using on device algorithms," a company spokesperson did not dispute the statement, instead pointing to Zuckerberg's blog post calling for precisely such filtering in its end-to-end encrypted products including WhatsApp [apparently this blog post], but declined to comment when asked for more detail about precisely when such an integration might happen... [T]here are myriad unanswered questions, with the company declining to answer any of the questions posed to it regarding why it is investing in building a technology that appears to serve little purpose outside filtering end-to-end encrypted communications and which so precisely matches Zuckerberg's call. Moreover, beyond its F8 presentation, given Zuckerberg's call for filtering of its end-to-end encrypted products, how does the company plan on accomplishing this apparent contradiction with the very meaning of end-to-end encryption?

The company's lack of transparency and unwillingness to answer even the most basic questions about how it plans to balance the protections of end-to-end encryption in its products including WhatsApp with the need to eliminate illegal content reminds us the giant leap of faith we take when we use closed encryption products whose source we cannot review... Governments are increasingly demanding some kind of compromise regarding end-to-end encryption that would permit them to prevent such tools from being used to conduct illegal activity. What would happen if WhatsApp were to receive a lawful court order from a government instructing it to insert such content moderation within the WhatsApp client and provide real-time notification to the government of posts that match the filter, along with a copy of the offending content?

Asked about this scenario, Carl Woog, Director of Communications for WhatsApp, stated that he was not aware of any such cases to date and noted that "we've repeatedly defended end-to-end encryption before the courts, most notably in Brazil." When it was noted that the Brazilian case involved the encryption itself, rather than a court order to install a real-time filter and bypass directly within the client before and after the encryption process at national scale, which would preserve the encryption, Woog initially said he would look into providing a response, but ultimately did not respond.

Given Zuckerberg's call for moderation of the company's end-to-end encryption products and given that Facebook's on-device content moderation appears to answer directly to this call, Woog was asked whether its on-device moderation might be applied in future to its other end-to-end encrypted products rather than WhatsApp. After initially saying he would look into providing a response, Woog ultimately did not respond.
Here's the exact words from Zuckerberg's March blog post. It said Facebook is "working to improve our ability to identify and stop bad actors across our apps by detecting patterns of activity or through other means, even when we can't see the content of the messages, and we will continue to invest in this work. "

An anonymous reader shares a report: Billions of people use the messaging tool WhatsApp, which added end-to-end encryption for every form of communication available on its platform back in 2016. This ensures that conversations between users and their contacts -- whether they occur via text or voice calls -- are private, inaccessible even to the company itself. But several recent posts published to Forbes' blogging platform call WhatsApp's future security into question. The posts, which were written by contributor Kalev Leetaru, allege that Facebook, WhatsApp's parent company, plans to detect abuse by implementing a feature to scan messages directly on people's phones before they are encrypted. The posts gained significant attention: A blog post by technologist Bruce Schneier rehashing one of the Forbes posts has the headline "Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp." It is a claim Facebook unequivocally denies.

"We haven't added a backdoor to WhatsApp," Will Cathcart, WhatsApp's vice president of product management, wrote in a statement. "To be crystal clear, we have not done this, have zero plans to do so, and if we ever did, it would be quite obvious and detectable that we had done it. We understand the serious concerns this type of approach would raise, which is why we are opposed to it."
UPDATE: Later Friday technologist Bruce Schneier wrote that after reviewing responses from WhatsApp, he's concluded that reports of a pre-encryption backdoor are a false alarm. He also says he got an equally strong confirmation from WhatsApp's Privacy Policy Manager Nate Cardozo, who Facebook hired last December from EFF. "He basically leveraged his historical reputation to assure me that WhatsApp, and Facebook in general, would never do something like this."