Is moving offshore really crazy?

Image: Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Today ZDNet published an article titled “The lunacy of trying to avoid NSA spying by moving e-mail and cloud out of the US” – I’m still trying to figure out if the position is naive, or intentionally ignores important facts.

In short, the author (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols) states that your data is safer in the US because outside of the US, the NSA has much less restrictive rules to operate under. This is actually true – the NSA is a spy agency; like most spy agencies, they spy on people.

For those outside of the US, or those that routinely communicate with those that are outside of the US – as far as the NSA goes, you are fair game. Anything and everything you do, if they can see it, they’ll use. So on that point, ZDNet was right.

But their points only hold true if you ignore cryptography.

When your data is outside the US, you have to rely on encryption to protect your data; inside the US you have to rely on FISC to protect you. The Lavabit affair (or Hushmail if you want another example) should make it clear that inside the US, encrypted data held by a third-party shouldn’t be seen as secure as it once was – for that matter, it probably shouldn’t be viewed as secure at all (if your adversary is the US Government; in which case, you don’t have much hope anyway).

When somebody posted a link to the article, I made my point short and sweet:

@gattaca It's a lot harder to break crypto than it is to order a provider to just hand over the data. With good crypto, offshore is safer.
— Adam Caudill (@adamcaudill) August 27, 2013

It’s hard to break properly implemented, strong cryptography – on the other hand, getting FISC to order a provider to hand over your data seems to be quite simple. Given the choice of relying on encryption or a rubber-stamp court to protect my data – the right choice seems obvious.

Now, in all fairness, it’s worth noting that the NSA likes to collect and examine encrypted communication more than other things – and the odds of your data passing through the NSA is certainly higher if your data is offshore. If properly encrypted though, the odds of them seeing the content is reduced.

So is it insane to move data offshore to avoid the NSA? If you want them to not see anything you do, then yes, yes it is. If you want to reduce the odds of them seeing the content – it’s actually a reasonably prudent move.

Adam Caudill

On NSA-Proof Security

@KimZetter We need to distinguish between "proof against NSA dragnet", "proof against NSA PRISM", and "proof against NSA TAO". @runasand — zooko (@zooko) September 17, 2014 For a long time, “military grade encryption” has been a red flag for snake oil, over-hyped, under-performing garbage, so much so that it’s become a punchline. Anytime that phrase is seen, it’s assumed that the product is a joke – quite possibly doing more harm than good.

OPSEC, The NSA, and You

It’s been two weeks since news broke about the NSA collecting massive amounts of data from Verizon; and likely everybody else. There’s also PRISM – whatever the hell that is – it seems there’s no agreement on that, and I doubt there will be anytime soon. What really matters here though, is we have proof that people are watching – and if it’s happening in the US, it’s probably happening everywhere else.

On Opportunistic Encryption

Opportunistic encryption has become quite a hot topic recently, and blew up in a big way thanks to an Internet Draft that was published on February 14th for what amounts to sanctioned man-in-the-middle. Privacy advocates were quickly up in arms – but it’s not that simple (see here). As pointed out by Brad Hill, this isn’t about HTTPS traffic, but HTTP traffic using unauthenticated TLS; thanks to poor wording in the document, it’s easy to miss that fact if you just skim it.

Do one thing right…

Everybody’s favorite whipping boy, Cryptocat is back in the news today – and it’s bad. Really bad. Steve Thomas has found a major flaw in the way Cryptocat generated ECC keys. Due to this flaw, the keyspace was only $2^{54.15}$, well below a secure level. Add a meet in the middle attack, and this is further reduced to $2^{27.08}$ – which based on my rough estimates, is just slightly more secure than a paper bag.

Worried about the NSA? Try AES-512!

…or, The Cost of Wild Speculation. “We need to boost our security – I think the NSA has broken everything we use. AES-256 is too weak, I don’t trust it. Find a way to implement AES-512.” Double-AES-256! It’d be easy, and double encrypting has never bitten us before. So, let’s write some code! def encrypt(msg, iv, key) return e(e(msg, iv, key.slice(0..31)), iv, key.slice(32..63)) end def decrypt(cipher, iv, key) return d(d(cipher, iv, key.