Yeah people on HN and elsewhere really have this warped view about how secure things are. They don’t understand that militaries and intelligence agencies are run by normal people with normal beauracies and dumb rules and shortsights. Look at the Snowden leaks, these people are not magical space wizards.
Use your imagination. Having a scrap of inside knowledge is a great asset for recruitment. You establish yourself as an insider and the target is more likely to spill some beans.
“Yeah, getting all those Foo widgets to that secret storage place was a real pain, I know! It was bunker X9, I think.. that’s the worst, am I right?"
More importantly, it's a bit harder to find (or operate) a reliable fully secure US owned communication system in Germany. Especially when compared to reliability and scale of the civilian GSM system.
The same way people believe that crypto-exchanges holding hundred of millions of dollars in coins must have James Bond movie kind of security, when in fact many times they just store the coins online on a computer connected to the internet.
There's people who are smart enough to design TEMPEST standards and a private global network, you'd think they could design something sufficiently idiot-proof to send military orders with ease. For fuck's sake, a basic messaging app hosted on military servers would do the trick, and it would be no different for users (rather than the Messages app, use the military app).
I respectfully disagree. For most troops, deploying with your personal device is a huge morale boost. Blocking GPS on these devices is not practical, and might actually help when it comes to innovation in the field (helicopter pilots using iPads to innovate routing, for example) - not to mention just basic morale (movies / music / what have you).
These tools also go a long way toward operational readiness / fitness. They incentivize these things and are used for a reason. There are trade-offs with all these things, not to mention the practical issues of blocking them.
I would expect, however, that identifying this as a huge security problem is relatively easy. "HEY DO NOT UPLOAD YOUR RUN WHILE DEPLOYED OR YOU MAY GET MORTARED" is likely a better option here, just below "MAKE SURE YOU WEAR YOUR NEON BELT" on every sign.
> "HEY DO NOT UPLOAD YOUR RUN WHILE DEPLOYED OR YOU MAY GET MORTARED" is likely a better option here, just below "MAKE SURE YOU WEAR YOUR NEON BELT" on every sign.
I take the whole lesson here to be: information can leak in unexpected ways. So solving this particular issue does nothing to help the larger problem. I'd imagine there are countless similar side channel leaks that already exist... and then even more that don't exist yet but will retroactively exist with a future phone or app update. The fox is in henhouse.
Agreed, but many times you need to be super explicit about the main channels, otherwise people just...forget and/or can't keep it all in their brain because some folks are bad with checklists.
It's stupid easy to leave an Apple Watch or FitBit on your wrist walking around a secure location (as evidence suggests). Big signs required to avoid these kinds of risks.
The signage required just to get people to leave their bloody phones outside a room is incredible - and they still err. Social Network training is already provided as well to avoid these kinds of social engineering risks, and yet... well, just search LinkedIn I'd imagine.
Communication with family and friends would be my first thought.
Many historical accounts put a lot of emphasise on the mail delivery and what the news from home was. It must be/have been a significant problem dealing with the mail when you had a lot of troops in the field.
Totally Agree. I was not assuming broadband capability / cell service for my hypothetical (also traditional comms may be limited in remote / classified environments) but that's definitely another reason to have a personal device. Comms with family would be critical if they are possible.
By now we all should have realized that all but a tiny fraction of people is illiterate about computers, the internet and their possibilities and dangers.
Because there are only so few people who have factually so much power, I urge every hacker, everybody who understands the digital world, to act in the best faith of everybody. This technological revolution is too important to serve only a few.
Luckily, many hackers do the right thing and don't do everything they could to maximize their immediate benefit. I sincerely hope for humanity, for the people of poor countries, for people suffering from corrupted governments, for people who weren't as fortunate as we were, that we provide them with the technology they need. But we must not maintain control over it to have control over them. Free and just software and hardware must prevail.
If you look at GPS watches like Garmin tactix Bravo. It has a feature set, where some of the features, really only makes sense in a military/hunting setting. Although I wonder what kind of animal you are hunting if you start your hunting trip by doing a HALO parachute jump.
Garmin is not the only one making those kind of GPS watches either. I believe that Suunto has similar watches as well.
Obviously the soldiers should not be uploading their GPS tracks to Strava. But banning your non special forces soldiers from buying the same "civilian" watches that your special forces soldiers use. Sounds like a morale killer.
If you look deeper into the security issues of USB and it’s less surprising: beyond the risk of basic malware, the devices are usually hackable which makes really hard to be certain about anything. Cutting out whole classes of attack makes sense when you know you have highly-skilled, well-funded adversaries and the budget to simply write off the extra overhead. Remember that their threat model doesn’t end at “my dirty picture collection leaked” but “we lost a war” or “we have to ask Congress for 10e9+ dollars for repairs/replacements”.
Around here a lot of places don't allow USB drives, but .. I think that's mostly a "Do Not Steal Our Data" policy.
Not, my real question is: Does that make sense? People talk about USB HID things, but .. I would expect that most keyboards and mice these days are using USB. So if you find a way to block USB drives for mass storage aka "Do Not Steal Data" uses, are you still open for all the "I type in exploits because I'm not really a USB drive, I can be a keyboard too" things?
At least 15 years ago I was told that the standard fix was epoxy: they’d pay a tech to chisel it off if the keyboard needed replacing rather than take the risk of unknown devices being plugged in.
> I can easily unplug them and insert my own, if you don't glue them in place.
Correct. If you're doing it right, you've blocked all unused ports, and you've glued in all used ports. Ideally having testing that the devices you're plugging in aren't already compromised first.
USB device fails and needs replacing? One place I worked disposed of the whole unit and bought a new computer to replace it, rather than dealing with glue removal. It's difficult to distinguish between legit and illegit tampering, so better to have no signs of tampering.
>I can easily unplug them and insert my own [keyboard/mouse]
Can you see where the problem lies? For you to be able to insert your own kb/mouse, you'd need to bring it from home in the first place. And while it might work if you're at an Internet cafe which isn't super strictly controlled, in an office with more stringent security requirements and checks you'd at least raise some eyebrows.
I was talking about the risks of having a USB device (not a keyboard, nor a mouse) being able to _act_ as one, delivering payloads. It can look like a normal usb drive or be tiny like a yubico key.
My subthread started as a reply to "Want to transfer files between computers? Can't use a thumb drive" and I wondered if that on its own - disallowing data transfers by say blocking USB mass storage device drivers or something - is useful or enough, when anything I can connect via USB can _act_ as a keyboard for example.
At no point did I talk about bringing an actual keyboard or mouse anywhere.
Could this be taken care of at the computer end instead, having the computer not automatically run things from a drive? It seems to me like the natural way to resolve the problem.
The drive might not be a drive but actually a program presenting as a keyboard that waits for a sufficient period of inactivity before performing a series of keypresses that runs arbitrary code and exfiltrates data off the back of that.
Not to mention lower level exploits that exist for USB.
There's WiFi enabled SD cards[0]. I had one of those and it was running Linux, you could SSH into it. Maybe the attack-surface to the host computer is smaller (I'm not sure about that either). But there's certainly enough bad stuff an SD card could do.
