[HN Gopher] Breaking NATO Radio Encryption [video]
___________________________________________________________________
Breaking NATO Radio Encryption [video]
Author : doener
Score : 148 points
Date : 2024-12-29 09:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (media.ccc.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (media.ccc.de)
| kensai wrote:
| Let's hope Putin does not watch this space!
| ElectRabbit wrote:
| Best case would be: they see the the analysis and say "fuck -
| that stuff is good. Not worth spending a second trying to
| analyze and decrypt it."
| ryao wrote:
| Why did the NSA not report this flaw to NATO before this became a
| standard? The NSA had differential cryptanalysis before anyone
| else. It is odd that they did not catch/report the problem.
| teh_infallible wrote:
| Maybe they wanted to decrypt NATO radio messages?
| exe34 wrote:
| being part of NATO, can't they just get a copy of the keys
| from somebody? or is it a case of "they might turn on us,
| better keep an ace"?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Seems less likely to happen than, well, what we have now.
| Russia has a lot of good mathematicians btw.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The first step in being discrete is being discrete.
|
| That is to say, if you want to crack NATO communiques your
| first step is to not call them up and ask for the goods.
|
| Whether this is ethically good or not is tangential and an
| exercise left to each reader.
| pm3003 wrote:
| NATO Keys are distributed to every NATO member through
| distribution agencies. A good chunk of them (and the
| algorithms and cipher equipment) are produced by the US and
| shared (with some limitations) with NATO. I don't know the
| scope of algorithm sharing but I believe there are some
| limitations for NATO access to US-shared algorithms.
|
| It's probably a case of 'nobody cares too much'. The
| standardization process is very long and the industry
| probably had already put them into their equipments.
|
| ALE is not used that much and from what I can gather manual
| frequency establishment is often preferred. I'm not sure
| what the actual operational impact of this DoS would be,
| and if some spoofing is possible, but the actual
| communication is encrypted by different protocols depending
| on the type of comms (RATT, IP-like, Voice) so actually
| deciphering comms wouldn't be possible.
|
| See Jerry Proc's website (https://jproc.ca/crypto/) for
| background knowledge.
| Liftyee wrote:
| Could they have thought it was NOBUS?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS
| exabrial wrote:
| I agree. I find it incredibly difficult to believe this wasn't
| a known issue until now. The NSA/CIA have unbelievable
| computing and analysis power available.
|
| Anyway, IDRTFA, but I hope this was at least reported before
| the release of the talk. This sort of thing could get a lot of
| people killed.
| ryao wrote:
| From what I read elsewhere, it was reported to NATO and NATO
| did not respond.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > This sort of thing could get a lot of people killed.
|
| NATO is not at war. People aren't dying.
|
| And I wouldn't be surprised if it's at least partly used to
| "leak" info to other state actors. Part of the cold war not
| turning hot was the mutual understanding of what went on in
| each block's military due to espionage. Without that, things
| could easily misinterpreted (and almost did a couple times
| like with able archer, which emphasizes the importance of
| this).
|
| Some things could not be shared officially but leaving it out
| in a not-fully-unbreakable form might well have been a way of
| hinting the enemy about intentions.
| atoav wrote:
| Because they A) are not that capable and did
| not know about it B) knew about it, but sat on it
| for their own egoistical reasons
|
| Both are rather a bad look
| lokimedes wrote:
| Or C) Blue team analysis is not offered the same resources
| and interest as Red team analysis.
|
| There's also the "don't ascribe to maliciousness what can be
| caused by bureaucracy"
| atoav wrote:
| What you describe in C falls under _A) are not that capable
| and did not know about it_ - investing all into offence
| means you 're not capable in defense. Making sure the
| encryption of the major military alliance you're part of
| doesn't fall apart seems like a serious miss, no matter how
| we slice it. Be the reason bureaucratic, malicous or
| financial.
| crest wrote:
| There're more options, but those require multiple nation
| states to work together in a conspiracy (everyone in the
| know) and all others to be incompetent. Given just publicly
| known facts and Occam's razor...
| meitham wrote:
| Likely a honey trap. NATO's adversaries can waste budget
| listening on this leaving the real comms unchecked, plus the
| advantage of throwing some false comms in the event of war.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| In practice this isn't a very useful attack. You need hours of
| encrypted and unencrypted data and you can then only decrypt
| the encrypted transmissions of the targeted node.
|
| The NSA if it knew about it most likely did disclosed the
| vulnerability, it was just deemed not significant enough to
| redesign, manufacture and re-issue millions of new radios.
|
| These radios aren't rated for secret communications anyhow. By
| the time you manage to decrypt what you want the information
| would likely be stale since all of the information passed over
| radios will be tactical in nature at best.
|
| There are still other defenses like spread spectrum
| transmission and frequency hopping that make intercepts harder.
| The main threat model against radios isn't actually message
| interception but rather basic SigInt that would be able to
| detect, identify and track transmissions.
|
| On the battlefield that's the most useful intelligence you'll
| get especially during war time.
|
| Any interception beyond that would take days if not weeks to be
| properly analyzed and disseminated this isn't something that it
| done on a regiment or division levels.
| ryao wrote:
| Thank you for this insightful answer.
| ugjka wrote:
| So you need 2 hours of both encrypted and unencrypted data at
| same time to make this attack work, is this feasible? And if you
| just flip the switch on devices to use more bits in the
| encryption the attack becomes unfeasible. Piss poor that NATO
| never replied to them.
| nielsole wrote:
| If you know the call signs you would get exactly that, wouldn't
| you? (I watched the talk only half attentively)
| nine_k wrote:
| Shouldn't actual session keys rotate all the time, to prevent
| exactly that?
| pm3003 wrote:
| They probably replied but:
|
| - anything serious is probably highly classified as is
| everything relating to COMSEC.
|
| - The standard seems to be a US-one used by NATO (MIL-STD as
| opposed to a STANAG).
|
| - I know ALE is used for link establishment but maybe it's
| going to be superseded in the military for the next-gen radio
| equipment?
| 0_____0 wrote:
| For those without a free hour to watch, here's the slide deck?
|
| I am not a cryptography or digital radio expert, so grain of salt
| and all that.
|
| Slide 14 shows real world feasibility, I think it's safe to say
| that while theoretically possible it's unlikely that this creates
| a significant real world issue. One bit of info I don't know -
| how long is a set of exchanged keys used for in most situations?
|
| https://tosc.iacr.org/index.php/ToSC/article/view/9856/11598
| XorNot wrote:
| Yeah I was looking for that. When I was in basic training the
| security of radio crypto was described as maybe a week in the
| field.
|
| Any attack taking years isn't going to be operationally
| relevant.
|
| I suspect this protocol was developed basically as a
| computational complexity trade off to keep within those sorts
| of boundaries.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| What are all these ccc.de links getting posted recently? Was
| there some sort of hacker convention?
| distances wrote:
| 38c3, the 38th Chaos Communication Congress, is currently
| running.
|
| https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/infos/startpage.html
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Yes, the Chaos Computer Club in Germany. 27-30 Dec (So
| currently ongoing).
| gunalx wrote:
| One of the greater hacker conferences in the year. (I am a huge
| fan of CCC and all events they do)
| Lockal wrote:
| Yes, the root post is here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42537631
| solarkraft wrote:
| Yup, europe's largest.
| mcint wrote:
| Each year, between Christmas and New Years.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| Sounds like this isn't anything new? The cited papers are from
| 2021, 2022, and 2023.
| jaeckel wrote:
| It's an evolution of said papers and AFAIU improves the attack
| to a level that makes it executable.
| anilakar wrote:
| Uhh, Charlie as the eavesdropper instead of Eve. Please do not
| reinvent industry standard terms.
| flanifan wrote:
| video no longer available.
| flanifan wrote:
| It seems all videos from https://media.ccc.de/ for 2024 aren't,
| a technical problem maybe
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-12-30 23:02 UTC)