#rC3 - What Price the Upload Filter?

rC3 preroll music

Herald: This is Ross Anderson, and he's
giving a talk to us today, and the title

is What Price the Upload Filter? From Cold
War to Crypto Wars and Back Again. And

we're very happy that he's here today. And
and for our non-English speaking public,

we have translations.
speaks german

Dieser Talk wird auf Deutsch übersetzt.
speaks french

Cette conférence est traduit en
français aussi.

Yeah. Um. Ross, ready to start? Let's go.
Have a good time. Enjoy.

Ross: Yes, ready to go. Thanks. OK. As has
been said, I'm Ross Anderson and I'm in

the position of being one of the old guys
of this field and that I've been involved

in the crypto wars right from the start.
And in fact, even since before the clipper

chip actually came out. If we could go to
the slides, please.

Right, can we see the slides?

silence

surprised the U.S. armed
forces. And guess what happened? Well, in

the 1950s, Boris Hagelin had set up that
company, secretly sold it to the NSA and

for a number of years, quite a lot of years,
countries as diverse as Latin America and

India and even NATO countries such as
Italy were buying machines from Crypto AG,

which the NSA could decipher. And this had
all sorts of consequences. For example,

it's been revealed fairly recently that
Britain's success against Argentina in the

Falklands War in 1982 was to a large
extent due to signals intelligence that

came from these machines. So, next slide,
please. And in this prehistory of the

crypto wars, almost all the play was
between governments. There was very little

role for civil society. There was one or
two journalists who were engaged in trying

to map what the NSA and friends were up to.
As far as industry was concerned, well, at

that time, I was working in banking and we
found that encryption for confidentiality

was discouraged. If we tried to use line
encryption, then false mysteriously

appeared on the line. But authentication
was OK. We were allowed to encrypt PIN

pad, PIN blocks. We were allowed to put
MACs on messages. There was some minor

harassment. For example, when Rivest,
Shamir and Adleman came up with their

encryption algorithm, the NSA tried to
make it classified. But the Provost of

MIT, Jerome Wiesner, persuaded them not to
make that fight. The big debate in the

1970s still, was whether the NSA affected
the design of the data encryption standard

algorithm, and we know now that this was
the case. It was designed to be only just

strong enough and Whit Diffie predicted
back in the 1970s that 2 to the power of

56 key search would eventually be
feasible. The EFF built a machine in 1998

and now of course that's fairly easy
because each bitcoin block costs 2 to

the power of 68 calculations. Next slide,
please. So where things get interesting is

that the NSA persuaded Bill Clinton in one
of his first cabinet meetings in 1993 to

introduce key escrow, the idea that the
NSA should have a copy of every of these

keys. And one of the people at that
meeting admitted later that President Bush,

the elder, had been asked and had refused,
but Clinton when he goes into office was

naive and thought that this was an
opportunity to fix the world. Now, the

clipper chip which we can see here, was
tamper resistant and had of secret block

cipher with an NSA backdoor key. And the
launch product was an AT&T secure phone.

Next slide, please. Now the Clipper protocol
was an interesting one in that each chip

had a unique secret key KU and a global
secret family key kNSA burned in. And in

order to, say, send data to Bob, Alice had
to send her clipper chip a working key kW,

which is generated by some external means,
such as a Diffie Hellman Key exchange. And

it makes a law enforcement access field,
which was basically Alice and Bob's names

with the working key encrypted under the
unit key and then a hash of the working

key encrypted under the NSA key. And that
was sent along with the cipher text to make

authorized wiretapping easy. And the idea
with the hash was that this would stop

cheating. Bob's Clipper Chip wouldn't use
a working key unless it came with a valid

LEAF. And I can remember, a few of us can
still remember, the enormous outcry that

this caused at the time. American
companies in particular didn't like it

because they started losing business to
foreign firms. And in fact, a couple of

our students here at Cambridge started a
company nCipher, that grew to be quite

large because they could sell worldwide,
unlike US firms. People said, why don't we

use encryption software? Well, that's easy
to write, but it's hard to deploy at

scale, as Phil Zimmermann found with PGP.
And the big concern was whether key escrow

would kill electronic commerce. A
secondary concern was whether, how on earth,

will we know if government designs are
secure? Why on earth should you trust the

NSA? Next slide, please. Well, the first
serious fight back in the crypto wars came

when Matt Blaze at Bell Labs found an
attack on Clipper. He found that Alice

could just try lots of these until one of
them works, because the tag was only 16

Bits long and it turned out that 2 to the
power of 112 of the 2 to the power of

128 possibilities work. And this meant
that Alice could generate a bogus LEAF

that would pass inspection, but which
wouldn't decrypt the traffic, and Bob

could also generate a new LEAF on the fly.
So you could write non-interoperable rogue

applications that the NSA has no access
to. And with a bit more work, you could

make rogue applications interoperate with
official ones. This was only the first of

many dumb ideas. Next slide, please. OK,
so why don't people just use software?

Well, at that time, the US had export
controls on intangible goods such as

software, although European countries
generally didn't. And this meant that US

academics couldn't put crypto code online,
although we Europeans could and we

did. And so Phil Zimmermann achieved fame
by exporting PGP, pretty good privacy, some

encryption software he had written for
America as a paper book. And this was

protected by the First Amendment. They
sent it across the border to Canada. They

fed it into an optical character
recognition scanner. They recompiled it

and the code had escaped. For this Phil
was subjected to a grand jury

investigation. There was also the
Bernstein case around code as free speech

and Bruce Schneier rose to fame with his
book "Applying Cryptography", which had

protocols, algorithms and source code in C,
which you could type in in order to get

cryptographic algorithms anywhere. And we
saw export-controlled clothing. This

t-shirt was something that many people wore
at the time. I've actually got one and I

planned to wear it for this. But
unfortunately, I came into the lab in

order to get better connectivity and I
left it at home. So this t-shirt was an

implementation of RSA written in perl,
plus a barcode so that you can scan it in.

And in theory, you should not walk across
the border wearing this t-shirt. Or if

you're a US citizen, you shouldn't even
let a non-US citizen look at it. So by

these means, people probed the outskirts of
what was possible and, you know an awful

lot of fun was had. It was a good laugh to
tweak the Tyrannosaur's tail. Next slide.

But this wasn't just something that was
limited to the USA. The big and obvious

problem, if you try and do key escrow in
Europe, is that there's dozens of

countries in Europe and what happens if
someone from Britain, for example, has got

a mobile phone that they bought in France
or a German SIM card and they're standing

on the streets in Stockholm and they phone
somebody who's in Budapest, who's got a

Hungarian phone with the Spanish SIM card
in it. Then which of these countries'

secret police forces should be able to
listen to the call. And this was something

that stalled the progress of key escrow,
that's a good way to describe it, in Europe.

And in 1996 GCHQ got academic colleagues
at Royal Holloway to come up with a

proposal for public sector email, which
they believe would fix this. Now, at the

time after clipper had fallen into
disrepute, the NSA's proposal was that

also the certification authority should have
to be licensed, and that this would enforce

a condition that all private keys would be
escrows, so you would only be able to get a

signature on your public key if the
private key was was held by the CA. And

the idea is that you'd have one CA for
each government department and civilians

would use trusted firms like Barclays Bank
or the post office, which would keep our

keys safe. And it would also work across
other EU member states, so that somebody in

Britain calling somebody in Germany would
end up in a situation where a trustworthy

CA, from the NSA's point of view, that is
an untrustworthy CA from our point of view,

in Britain would be prepared to make a key
and so would one in Germany. This, at

least, was the idea. So how do we do this,
next slide, on the GCHQ protocol. So here's

how it was designed to work in the UK
government. If Alice at the Department of

Agriculture wants to talk to Bob at the
Department of Business, she asks her

Departmental Security Officer DA for a send
key for herself and a receive key for Bob.

And DA and DB get a top level
interoperability key KTAB from GCHQ and DA

calculates a secret send key of the day as
a hash of KTAB and Alice's name and the

DA's own Identity for Alice which he gives
to Alice and similarly a public receive

key of the day for Bob and Alice sends Bob
her public send key along with the

encrypted message and Bob can go
to his DSO and get his secret receive

key of the day. Now this is slightly
complicated and there's all sorts of other

things wrong with it once you start to
look at it. Next slide, please. The first

is that from the point of view of the
overall effect, you could just as easily

have used Kerberos because you've
basically got a key distribution center at

both ends, which knows everybody's keys. So
you've not actually gained very much by

using complicated public key mechanisms,
and the next problem is what's the law

enforcement access need for centrally
generated signing keys? If this is

actually for law enforcement rather than
intelligence? Well, the police want to be

able to read things, not forge things. A
third problem is that keys involve hashing

department names and governments are
changing the name of the departments all

the time, as the prime minister of the day
moves his ministers around and they chop

and change departments. And this means, of
course, that everybody has to get new

cryptographic keys and suddenly the old
cryptographic keys don't work anymore. And

those are horrendous complexity comes from
this. Now, there are about 10 other things

wrong with this protocol, but curiously
enough, it's still used by the UK

government for the top secret stuff. It
went through a number of iterations. It's

now called Mikey Sakke, there's details in
my security engineering book. And it

turned out to be such a pain that the
stuff below top secret now is just used as

a branded version of G suite. So if what
you want to do is to figure out what

speech Boris Johnson will be making
tomorrow, we just have to guess the

password recovery questions for his
private secretaries and officials. Next

slide, the global Internet Trust Register.
This was an interesting piece of fun we

had around the 1997 election when Tony
Blair took over and introduced the Labor

government before the election, Labor
promised to not seize crypto keys in bulk

without a warrant. And one of the
first things that happened to him once he

was in office is Vice President Al Gore
went to visit him and all of a sudden Tony

Blair decided that he wanted all
certification authorities to be licensed

and they were about to rush this through
parliament. So we put all the important

public keys in a paper book and we took it
to the cultural secretary, Chris Smith,

and we said, you're the minister for books
why are you passing a law to ban this

book. And if you'll switch to the video
shot, I've got the initial copy of the

book that we just put together on the
photocopying machine in the department.

And then we sent the PDF off to MIT and
they produced it as a proper book. And

this means that we had a book which is
supposedly protected and this enabled us

to get the the topic onto the agenda for
cabinet discussion. So this at least

precipitous action, we ended up with the
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill in

2000. That was far from perfect, but that
was a longer story. So what happened back

then is that we set up an NGO, a digital
rights organization, the Foundation for

Information Policy Research. And the
climate at the time was such that we had

no difficulty raising a couple of hundred
thousand pounds from Microsoft and Hewlett

Packard and Redbus and other tech players.
So we were able to hire Casper Bowden for

three years to basically be the director
of FIPR and to lobby the government hard

on this. And if we can go back to the
slides, please, and go to the next slide,

the slide on bringing it all together. So
in 1997, a number of us, Hal Abelson and I

and Steve Bellovin and Josh Benaloh from
Microsoft and Matt Blaze who had broken

Clipper and Whit Diffie, who invented
digital signatures, and John Gilmore of

EFF, Peter Neumann of SRI, Ron Rivest,
Jeff Schiller of MIT and Bruce Schneier

who had written applied cryptography and
got together and wrote a paper on the

risks of key recovery, key escrow and
trust in third party encryption, where we

discussed the system consequences of
giving third party or government access to

both traffic data and content without user
notice or consent deployed internationally

and available around the clock. We came to
the conclusion that this was not really

doable. It was simply too many
vulnerabilities and too many complexities.

So how did it end? Well, if we go to the
next slide, the victory in Europe wasn't

as a result of academic arguments. It was
a result of industry pressure. And we owe

a debt to Commissioner Martin Bangemann
and also to the German government who

backed him. And in 1994, Martin had put
together a group of European CEOs to

advise him on internet policy. And they
advised them to keep your hands off until

we can see which way it's going. That's
just wrong with this thing and see what we

can do with it. And the thing that he
developed in order to drive a stake

through the heart of key escrow was the
Electronic Signatures Directive in 1999.

And this gave a rebuttable presumption of
validity to qualifying electronic

signatures, but subject to a number of
conditions. And one of these was that the

signing key must never be known to anybody
else other than the signer and this killed

the idea of licensing CAs in such a way
that the the NSA had access to all the

private key material. The agencies had
argued that without controlling

signatures, you couldn't control
encryption. But of course, as intelligence

agencies, they were as much interested in
manipulating information as they were in

listening into it. And this created a
really sharp conflict with businesses. In

the U.K., with the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Bill went through the

following year. And there we got strong
support from the banks who did not want

the possibility of intelligence and law
enforcement personnel either getting hold

of bank keys or forging banking
transactions. And so we managed to, with

their help to insert a number of
conditions into the bill, which meant that

if a court or chief constable, for
example, demands a key from a company,

they've got to demand it from somebody at
the level of a director of the company.

And it's got to be signed by someone
really senior such as the chief constable.

So there was some controls that we managed
to get in there. Next slide! What did

victory in the USA look like? Well, in the
middle of 2000 as a number of people had

predicted, Al Gore decided that he wanted
to stop fighting the tech industry in

order to get elected president. And there
was a deal done at the time which was

secret. It was done at the FBI
headquarters at Quantico by US law

enforcement would rely on naturally
occurring vulnerabilities rather than

compelling their insertion by companies
like Intel or Microsoft. This was secret

at the time, and I happen to know about it
because I was consulting for Intel and the

NDA I was under had a four year time
limits on it. So after 2004, I was at the

ability to talk about this. And so this
basically gave the NSA access to the CERT

feed. And so as part of this deal, the
export rules were liberalized a bit, but

with various hooks and gotchas left so
that the authorities could bully companies

who got too difficult. And in 2002, Robert
Morris, senior, who had been the chief

scientist at the NSA at much of this
period, admitted that the real policy goal

was to ensure that the many systems
developed during the dot com boom were

deployed with weak protection or none. And
there's a huge, long list of these. Next

slide, please. So what was the collateral
damage from crypto war one? This is the

first knuckle pass of this talk, which
I've got together as a result of spending

the last academic year writing the third
edition of my book on security engineering

as I've gone through and updated all the
chapters on car security, the role of

security and web security and so on and so
forth, we find everywhere. But there are

still very serious costs remaining from
crypto war one, for example, almost all of

the remote key entry systems for cars use
inadequate cryptography for random

number generators and so on and so forth.
And car theft has almost doubled in the

past five years. This is not all due to
weak crypto, but it's substantially due to

a wrong culture that was started off in
the context of the crypto wars. Second,

there are millions of door locks still
using Mifare classic, even the building

where I work. For example, the University
of Cambridge changed its door locks around

2000. So we've still got a whole lot of
mifare classic around. And it's very

difficult when you've got 100 buildings to
change all the locks on them. And this is

the case with thousands of organizations
worldwide, with universities, with banks,

with all sorts of people, simply because
changing all the locks at once and dozens

of buildings is just too expensive. Then,
of course, there's the CA in your

browser, most nations own or control
certification authorities that your

browser trusts and the few nations that
weren't allowed to own such CAs, such as

Iran, get up to mischief, as we find in
the case of the DigiNotar hack a few years

ago. And this means that most nations have
got a more or less guaranteed ability to

do man in the middle attacks on your Web
log ons. Some companies like Google, of

course, started to fix that with various
mechanisms such as certificate pinning.

But that was a deliberate vulnerability
that was there for a long, long time and

is still very widespread. Phones. 2G is
insecure. That actually goes back to the

Cold War rather than the crypto war. But
thanks to the crypto wars 4G and 5G are

not very much better. The details are
slightly complicated and again, they're

described in the book, Bluetooth is easy
to hack. That's another piece of legacy.

And as I mentioned, the agencies own the
CERT's responsible disclosure pipeline,

which means that they got a free fire hose
of zero days that they can exploit

for perhaps a month or three before these
end up being patched. So next slide,

please. Last year when I talked at Chaos
Communication Congress, the audience chose

this as the cover for my security
engineering book, and that's now out. And

it's the process of writing this that
brought home to me the scale of the damage

that we still suffered as a result of
crypto war one. So let's move on to the

next slide and the next period of history,
which we might call the war on terror. And

I've arbitrarily put this down as 2000 to
2013 although some countries stoped using

the phrase war on terror in about 2008
once we have got rid of George W. Bush and

Tony Blair. But as a historical
convenience, this is, if you like, the

central period in our tale. And it starts
off with a lot of harassment around the

edges of security and cryptography. For
example, in 2000, Tony Blair promoted the

EU dual use regulation number 1334 to
extend export controls from tangible goods

such as rifles and tanks to intangibles
such as crypto software. Despite the fact

that he has basically declared peace on
the tech industry. Two years later, in

2002, the UK parliament balked at an
export control bill that was going to

transpose this because it added controls
on scientific speech, not just crypto

code, but even papers on cryptanalysis and
even electron microscope scripts and

so parliament started the research
exemption clause at the arguments of the

then president of the Royal Society, Sir
Robert May. But what then happened is that

GCHQ used EU regulations to frustrate
Parliament and this pattern of extralegal

behavior was to continue. Next slide!
Because after export control, the place

shifted to traffic data retention, another
bad thing that I'm afraid to say, the UK

exported to Europe back in the days when
we were, in effect, the Americans

consigliere on the European Council. Sorry
about that, folks, but all I can say is at

least we helped start EDRI a year after
that. So one of the interesting aspects of

this was that our then home secretary,
Jacqui Smith, started talking about the

need for a common database of all the
metadata of who had phoned whom when, who

had sent an email to whom when, so that
the police could continue to use the

traditional contact tracing techniques
online. And the line that we got hammered

home to us again and again and again was
if you got nothing to hide, you've got

nothing to fear. What then happened in
2008, is that a very bad person went into

Parliament and went to the PC where the
expense claims of MPs were kept and they

copied all the expense claims onto a DVD
and they sold it around Fleet Street. And

so The Daily Telegraph bought it from them
for 400˙000£. And then for the best

part of a year, the Daily Telegraph was
telling scandalous things about what

various members of parliament had claimed
from the taxpayer. But it turned out that

also Jacqui Smith may have been innocent.
Her husband had been downloading

pornography and charging it to our
parliamentary expenses. So she lost her

job as home secretary and she lost her
seat in parliament and the communications

data bill was lost. So was this a victory?
Well, in June 2013, we learned from Ed

Snowden that they just built it anyway,
despite parliament. So maybe the victory

in parliament wasn't what it seemed to be
at the time. But I'm getting ahead of

myself; anyway. Next slide, please. The
other thing that we did in the 2000s is

that we spent, I spent maybe a third of my
time and about another hundred people

joined and we developed the economics of
security as a discipline. We began to

realize that many of the things that went
wrong happened because Alice was guarding

a system and Bob was paying the cost of
failure. For example, if you got a payment

system, then in order to prevent fraud,
what you basically have to do is to get

the merchants and the bank to buy
transactions from them, to take care of

the costs of fraud, follow the cardholder
of the banks that issue them with cards.

And the two aren't the same. But it's this
that causes the governance tensions and

causes governments to break down and makes
fraud harder than it should be. Now after

that, one of the early topics was
patching and responsible disclosure. And

we worked through all the issues of
whether you should not patch at all, which

some people in industry wanted to do, or
whether you should just put all the bugs

on bug trackers which some hackers wanted
to do or whether you would go through the

CERT system despite the NSA compromise,
because they at least would give you legal

cover. And, you know, bully Microsoft into
catching the bug the next patch Tuesday

and then the disclosure after 90 days. And
we eventually came to the conclusion as an

industry followed that responsible
disclosure was the way to go. Now, one of

the problems that arises here is the
equities issue. Suppose you're the

director of the NSA and somebody comes to
you with some super new innovative bug.

You say they have rediscovered Spectre,
for example. And so you've got a bug which

can be used to penetrate any crypto
software that's out there. Do you report

the bug to Microsoft and Intel to defend
300 million Americans, or do you keep it

quiet so you can exploit 450 million
Europeans and a thousand billion Chinese

and so on and so forth? Well, once you put
it that way, it's fairly obvious that the

NSA will favor attack over defense. And
there are multiple models of attack and

defense. You can think of institutional
factors and politics, for example, if you

are director of the NSA, and you defend
300 million Americans. You defend the

White House against the Chinese hacking
it. You know, the president will never

know if he's hacked or not because the
Chinese will keep it quiet if they do. But

if, on the other hand, you manage to hack
the Politburo land in Peking, you can put

some juicy intelligence every morning with
the president's breakfast cereal. So

that's an even stronger argument of why
you should do attack rather than defense.

And all the thing that I mentioned in
passing is that throughout the 2000s,

governments also scrambled to get more
data of the citizens, for example, in

Britain with a long debate about whether
medical records should be centralized. In

the beginning, we said if you were to
centralize all medical records, that would

be such a large target that the database
should be top secret and it would be too

inconvenient for doctors to use. Well,
Blair decided in 2001 to do it anyway. We

wrote a report in 2009 saying that this
was a red line and that this was a serious

hazard and then in 2014 we discovered that
Cameron's buddy, who was the transparency

czar and the NHS had sold the database to
1200 researchers, including drug companies

in China. So that meant that all the
sensitive personal health information

about one billion patients episodes had
been sold around the world and was

available to not just to medical
researchers, but to foreign intelligence

services. This brings us on to Snowden. In
June 2013. We had one of those game

changing moments when Ed Snowden leaked a
whole bunch of papers showing that the NSA

had been breaking the law in America and
GCHQ had been breaking the law in Britain,

that we have been lied to, the parliament
had been misled, and a whole lot of

collection and interception was going on,
which supposedly shouldn't have been going

on. Now, one of the things that got
industry attention was a system called

PRISM, which was in fact legal because
this was done as a result of warrants

being served on the major Internet service
providers. And if we could move to the

next slide, we can see that this started
off with Microsoft in 2007. Yahoo! in

2008, they fought in court for a year they
lost and then Google and Facebook and so on

got added. This basically enabled the NSA
to go to someone like Google and say

[e-mail] is a foreign
national, we're therefore entitled to read

his traffic, kindly give us his Gmail. And
Google would say, yes, sir. For Americans,

you have to show probable cause that
they've committed a crime for foreigners

you simply have to show probable cause
that they're a foreigner. The next slide.

This disclosure from Snowden disclosed
that PRISM, despite the fact that it only

costs about 20 million dollars a year, was
generating something like half of all the

intelligence that the NSA was using. By
the end of financial year 2012, but that

was not all. Next slide, please. The thing
that really annoyed Google was this slide

on the deck from a presentation at GCHQ
showing how the NSA was not merely

collecting stuff through the front door by
serving warrants on Google in Mountain

View, it was collecting stuff through the
backdoor as well, because they were

harvesting the plaintext copies of Gmail
and maps and docs and so on, which were

being sent backwards and forwards between
Google's different data centers. And the

little smiley face, which you can see on
the sticky, got Sergei and Friends really,

really uptight. And they just decided,
right, you know, we're not going to allow

this. They will have to knock and show
warrants in the future. And there was a

crash program and all the major Internet
service providers to encrypt all the

traffic so that in future things could
only be got by means of a warrant. Next

slide, please. The EU was really annoyed
by what was called Operation Socialist.

Operation Socialist was basically, the
hack of Belgacom and the idea was that

GCHQ spearfished some technical staff at
Belgacom and this enabled them to wiretap

all the traffic at the European Commission
in Brussels and as well as mobile phone

traffic to and from various countries in
Africa. And this is rather amazing. It's

as if Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister
of Scotland, had tasked Police Scotland

with hacking BT so that she could watch
out what was going on with the parliament

in London. So this annoyed a number of
people. With the next slide, we can see.

That the the Operation Bull Run, an
operation Edgehill, as GCHQ called their

version of it, have an aggressive,
multipronged efforts to break widely used

Internet encryption technologies. And we
learned an awful lot about what was being

done to break VPNs worldwide and what had
been done in terms of inserting

vulnerabilities and protocols, getting
people to use vulnerable prime numbers for

Diffie Hellman key exchange and so on and
so forth. Next slide, first slide and

Bullrun and Edgehill SIGINT enabling
projects actively engages the US and

foreign IT industries to covertly
influence and/or overtly leverage their

commercial products' designs. These design
changes make the systems in question

exploitable through SIGINT collection
endpoint midpoints, et cetera, with

foreknowledge of the modification, the
consumer and other adversaries however the

system security remains intact. Next
slide, so the insert vulnerabilities into

commercial systems, I.T. systems, networks
and point communication devices used by

targets. Next slide. They also influence
policy standards and specifications for

commercial public key technologies, and
this was the smoking gun that

crypto war 1 had not actually ended. It had
just gone undercover. And so with this,

things come out into the open next slide
so we could perhaps date crypto war 2 to

the Snowden disclosures in their aftermath
in America. It must be said that all three

arms of the US government showed at least
mild remarks. Obama set up the NSA review

group and adopted most of what it said
except on the equities issue. Congress got

data retention, renewed the Patriot Act
and the FISA court introduced an advocate

for Targets. Tech companies as I
mentioned, started encrypting all their

traffic. In the UK on the other hand,
governments expressed no remorse at all,

and they passed the Investigatory Powers
Act to legalize all the unlawful things

they've already been doing. And they could
now order firms secretly do anything they

physically can. However, data retention
was nixed by the European courts. The

academic response in the next slide, keys
under doormats, much the same authors as

before. We analyzed the new situation and
came to much of the same conclusions. Next

slide, the 2018 GCHQ
proposals from Ian Levy and Crispin

Robinson proposed to add ghost users to
WhatsApp and FaceTime calls in response to

warrants. The idea is that you've got an
FBI key on your device hearing. You still

have end to end, so you just have an extra
end. And this, of course, fills the keys

on the doormats tests. Your software would
abandon best practice. It would create

targets and increase complexity and it
would also have to lie about trust. Next

slide, please. This brings us to the
upload filters which were proposed over

the past six months, they first surfaced
in early 2020 to a Stanford think tank and

they were adopted by Commissioner Ylva
Johansson on June the 9th at the start of

the German presidency. On the 20th of
September we got a leaked tech paper whose

authors include our GCHQ friends Ian Levie
and Crispin Robinson. The top options are

that you filter in client software
assisted by a server, as client side only

filtering is too constrained and easy to
compromise. The excuse is that you want to

stop illegal material such as child sex
abuse images being shared over end to end

messaging system such as WhatsApp. Various
NGOs objected, and we had a meeting with

the commission, which was a little bit
like a Stockholm Syndrome event. We had

one official there on the child protection
front fax by half a dozen officials from

various security bodies, departments and
agencies who seemed to be clearly driving

the thing with child protection merely
being an excuse to promote this lead.

Well, the obvious things to worry about
are as a similar language in the new

terror regulation, you can expect the
filter to extend from child sex abuse

material to terror. And static filtering
won't work because if there's a bad list

of 100˙000 forbidden images, then the bad
people will just go out and make another

100˙000 child sex abuse images. So the
filtering will have to become dynamic. And

then the question is whether your form
will block it or report it. And there's an

existing legal duty in a number of
countries and in the UK to although

obviously no longer a member state, the
existing duty to report terror stuff. And

the question is, who will be in charge of
updating the filters? What's going to

happen then? Next slide. Well, we've seen
an illustration during the lockdown in

April, the French and Dutch government
sent an update to all Encrochat mobile

phones with a rootkit which copied
messages, crypto keys and lock screen

passwords. The Encrochat was a brand of
mobile phone that was sold through

underground channels to various criminal
groups and others. And since this was

largely used by criminals of various
kinds, the U.K. government justify bulk

intercepts by passing its office targets
and equipment interference. In other

words, they brought a targeted warrant for
all forty five thousand Encrochat handsets

and of ten thousand users in the U.K.,
eight hundred were arrested in June when

the wire tapping exercise was completed.
Now, again, this appears to ignore the

laws that we have on the books because
even our Investigatory Powers Act rules

out all interception of U.K.
residents. And those who follow such

matters will know that there was a trial
at Liverpool Crown Court, a hearing of

whether this stuff was admissible. And we
should have a first verdict on that early

in the new year. And that will no doubt go
to appeal. And if the material is held to

be admissible, then there will be a whole
series of trials. So this brings me to my

final point. What can we expect going
forward? China is emerging as a full-stack

competitor to the West, not like Russia in
Cold War one, because Russia only ever

produced things like primary goods, like
oil and weapons in trouble, of course. But

China is trying to compete all the way up
and down the stack from chips, through

software, up through services and
everything else. And developments in China

don't exactly fill one with much
confidence, because in March 2018,

President Xi declared himself to be ruler
for life, basically tearing up the Chinese

constitution. There are large-scale state
crimes being committed in Tibet and

Xiniang and elsewhere. Just last week,
Britain's chief rabbi described the

treatment of Uyghurs as an unfathomable
mass atrocity. In my book, I describe

escalating cyber conflict and various
hacks, such as the hack of the Office of

Personnel Management, which had clearance
files on all Americans who work for the

federal governments, the hack of Equifax,
which got credit ratings and credit

histories of all Americans. And there are
also growing tussles and standards. For

example, the draft ISO 27553 on biometric
authentication for mobile phones is

introducing at the insistence of Chinese
delegates, a central database option. So

in future, your phone might not verify
your faceprint or your fingerprint

locally. It might do it with a central
database. Next slide, how could Cold War

2.0 be different? Well, there's a number
of interesting things here, and the

purpose of this talk is to try and kick
off a discussion of these issues. China

makes electronics, not just guns, the way
the old USSR did. Can you have a separate

supply chain for China and one for
everybody else? But hang on a minute,

consider the fact that China has now
collected very substantial personal data

sets on the Office of Personnel
Management, the US government employees,

by forcing Apple to set up its own data
centers in China for iPhone users in

China, they get access to all the data
for Chinese users of iPhones that America

gets for American users of iPhones, plus
maybe more as well. If the Chinese can

break the HSMs in Chinese data centers as
we expect them to be able to, Equifax got

them data on all economically active
people in the USA. care.data gave them

medical records of everybody in the UK.
And this bulk personal data is already

being targeted in intelligence use when
Western countries, for example, send

diplomats to countries in Africa or Latin
America or local Chinese counter-

intelligence, people know whether they're
bona fide diplomats or whether they're

intelligence agents, undercover, all
from exploitation of all this personal

information. Now, given that this
information's already in efficient targeted

use, the next question we have to ask is
when will it be used at scale? And this is

the point at which we say that the
equities issue now needs a serious rethink

and the whole structure of the conflict is
going to have to move from more offensive

to more defensive because we depend on
supply chains to which the Chinese have

access more than they depend on supply
chains to which we have access. Now, it's

dreadful that we're headed towards a new
Cold War, but as we head there, we have to

ask also the respective roles of
governments, industry and civil society,

academia. Next slide, please. And so
looking for my point is this. That is Cold

War 2.0 does happen. I hope it doesn't.
But we appear to be headed that way

despite the change of governments in the
White House. Then we need to be able to

defend everybody, not just the elites. No,
it's not going to be easy because there

are more state players, the USA is a big
block, the EU is a big block. There are

other players, other democracies that are
other non democracies. Those other failing

democracies. This is going to be complex
and messy. It isn't going to be a

situation like last time where big tech
reaches out to civil society and academia

and we could see a united front against
the agencies. And even in that case, of

course, the victory that we got was only
an apparent victory, a superficial victory

that's only lasted for a while. So what
could we do? Well, at this point, I think

we need to remind all the players to
listen. But it's not just about strategy

and tactics, but it's about values, too.
And so we need to be firmly on the side of

freedom, privacy and the rule of law. Now,
for the old timers, you may remember that

there was a product called Tom-Skype,
which was introduced in 2011 in China. The

Chinese wanted the citizens to be able to
use Skype, but they wanted to be able to

wiretap as well, despite the fact that
Skype at the time had end to end

encryption. And so people in China were
compelled to download a client for Skype

called Tom-Skype. Tom was the company that
distributed Skype in China and it

basically had built in wire tapping. So
you had end to end encryption using Skype

in those days. But in China, you ended up
having a Trojan client, which you had to

use. And what we are doing at the moment
is basically the EU is trying to copy Tom-

Skype and saying that we should be doing
what China was doing eight years ago. And

I say we should reject that. We can't
challenge President Xi by going down that

route. Instead, we've got to reset our
values and we've got to think through the

equities issue and we've got to figure out
how it is that we're going to deal with

the challenges of dealing with non-
democratic countries when there is serious

conflict in a globalized world where we're
sharing the same technology. Thanks. And

perhaps the last slide for my book can
come now and I'm happy to take questions.

Herald: Yeah, thanks a lot, Ross, for your
talk. It's a bit depressing to listen to

you. I have to admit let's have a look.
OK, so I have a question. I'm wondering if

the export controls at EU level became
worse than UK level export controls

because entities like GCHQ had more
influence there or because there's a harmful

Franco German security culture or what it
was. Do you have anything on that?

Ross: Well, the experience that we had
with these export controls, once they were

in place, was as follows. It was about
2015 I think, or 2016, It came to our

attention that a British company, Sophos,
was selling bulk surveillance equipment to

President al Assad of Syria, and he was
using it to basically wiretap his entire

population and decide who he was going to
arrest and kill the following day. And it

was sold by Sophos in fact, through a
German subsidiary. And so we went along to

the export control office in Victoria
Street. A number of NGOs, the open rights

group went along and Privacy International
and us and one or two others. And we said,

look, according to the EU dual use
regulation, bulk intercept equipment is

military equipment. It should be in the
military list. Therefore, you should be

demanding an export license for this
stuff. And they found every conceivable

excuse not to demand it. And it was the
lady from GCHQ there in the room who was

clearly calling the shots. And she was
absolutely determined that there should be

no export controls on the stuff being sold
to Syria. And eventually I said, look,

it's fairly obvious what's going on here.
If there's going to be black boxes and

President al-Assad's network, you want
them to be British black boxes or German

black boxes, not Ukrainian or Israeli
black boxes. And she said, I cannot

discuss classified matters in an open
meeting, which is as close as you get to

an admission. And a couple of months
later, Angela Merkel, to her great credit,

has actually come out in public and said
that allowing the equipment to be exported

from Utimaco to Syria was one of the
hardest decision she'd ever taken as

counselor. And that was a very difficult
tradeoff between maintaining intelligence

access, given the possibility that Western
troops would be involved in Syria and the

fact that the kit was being used for very
evil purposes. So that's an example of how

the export controls are used in practice.
They are not used to control the harms

that we as voters are told that they're
there to control. Right. They are used in

all sorts of dark and dismal games. And we
really have to tackle the issue of export

controls with our eyes open.
H: Yeah, yeah. There's a lot a lot to do.

And now Germany has left the EU, UN
Security Council. So let's see what

happens next. Yeah. We'll see, Ross.
Anything else you'd like to add? We don't

have any more questions. Oh, no, we have
another question. It's just come up

seconds ago. Do you think that refusal to
accept back doors will create large

uncensorable applications?
R: Well, if you get large applications

which are associated with significant
economic power, then low pressure gets

brought to bear on those economic players
to do their social duty. And... this is what

we have seen with the platforms that
intermediate content, that act as content

intermediaries such as Facebook and Google
and so on, that they do a certain amount

of filtering. But if, on the other hand,
you have wholesale surveillance before the

fact of End-To-End encrypted stuff, then
are we moving into an environment where

private speech from one person to another
is no longer permitted? You know, I don't

think that's the right trade off that we
should be taking, because we all know from

hard experience that when governments say,
think of the children, they're not

thinking of children at all. If they were
thinking of children, they would not be

selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates to kill children in

Yemen. And they say think about terrorism.
But the censorship that we are supposed to

use in universities around terrorism, the
so-called prevent duty is known to be

counterproductive. It makes Muslim
students feel alienated and marginalized.

So the arguments that governments use
around this are not in any way honest. And

we now have 20 years experience of these
dishonest arguments. And for goodness

sake, let's have a more grown up
conversation about these things.

H: Now, you're totally right, even if I
have to admit, it took me a couple of

years, not 20, but a lot to finally
understand, OK? This I think that's it, we

just have another comment and I'm thanking
you for your time and are you in an

assembly somewhere around hanging around
in the next hour or so? Maybe if someone

wants to talk to you, he can just pop by
if you ever if you have used this 2d world

already.
R: No, I haven't been using the 2d world.

I had some issues with my browser and
getting into it. But I've got my my

webpage and my email address is public and
anybody who wants to discuss these things

is welcome to get in touch with me.
Herald: All right. So thanks a lot.

R: Thank you for the invitation.
H: Yeah. Thanks a lot.

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