Encryption & New Zealand Law

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kyhwana2

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#836095 12-Jun-2013 23:05

Now's a good time to start using PGP/OTR and any other encrypted communications as well as getting other people to use them.. (Skype doesn't count!)

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1080p

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#836330 13-Jun-2013 14:08

Ha! Skype is not secure at all.

Any communication I need to care about is already adequately secured and any logs are stored on encrypted drives at both ends.

kyhwana2

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#836603 13-Jun-2013 23:11

1080p: Ha! Skype is not secure at all.

Any communication I need to care about is already adequately secured and any logs are stored on encrypted drives at both ends.

For proof skype isn't secure, see http://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2013-May/004224.html

SaltyNZ

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#836641 14-Jun-2013 07:03

kyhwana2:
1080p: Ha! Skype is not secure at all.

Any communication I need to care about is already adequately secured and any logs are stored on encrypted drives at both ends.

For proof skype isn't secure, see http://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2013-May/004224.html

Even if it were there are a lot of things you can do with analysis of the encrypted stream. VoIP systems conserve bandwidth by only transmitting packet data when there is audio to be sent, and by using variable bit rates to encode the audio that must be transmitted. At a high level, this means you can tell who's talking on either end of the conversation by watching who is transmitting.

But even better than that, speech has an audio fingerprint. Each word, or phrase, has a unique pattern of amplitude that translates directly into a variable bitrate. That bitrate variation is preserved by encryption.

These guys, even in 2010, were able to identify the speech in an encrypted VoIP stream with at least 50% and in some cases 90% accuracy. If they were publicly announcing that result in 2010, imagine what the NSA with could do in 2013 with a couple of football fields worth of supercomputer.

So... if you are using VoIP, you may be able to be spied upon by a sufficiently tooled up eavesdropper even with perfect ciphering.

Having said that you can counteract this technique by using a fixed-rate codec like G.711 which transmits constant 64kbps audio even during silence. Or perhaps you can go ahead and create a new codec which adds random padding to variable bitrate speech compression to smear it out whilst still saving some bandwidth compared to fixed rate.

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SaltyNZ

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#844064 25-Jun-2013 15:21

Anyone else written to their MP and/or other parliamentarian about their objections? I emailed my local MP (National Party) about the interception bill, pointing him to Tech Liberty's submission. He emailed back to say that the changes were 'technical ones as all the powers contained in the legislation are currently available'. I pointed out several that were not, but have not had a reply.

I also emailed Winston Peters this morning after reading he's not quite convinced to vote for it yet, urging him not to, until there are better safeguards.

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kyhwana2

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#845211 25-Jun-2013 19:43

My MP is a National MP that ended up voting against a few more liberal things, so I havn't wasted my time writing him.

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