Ask Slashdot: Can Commercial Hardware Routers Be Trusted? 213
First time accepted submitter monkaru writes "Given reports that various vendors and encryption algorithms have been compromised. Is it still possible to trust any commercial hardware routers or is 'roll your own' the only reasonable path going forward?" What do you do nowadays, if anything, to maintain your online privacy upstream of your own computer?
No. (Score:5, Interesting)
'nuff said.
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
actually the obvious answer is that trust is not a binary thing. Evaluate your threat models. If you want to be safe from the NSA, and you are protecting information they want to know, then yes, I would say that eschewing any technology from corporations that are easily coerced by the NSA would be a good idea. Of course, that is practically impossible. But you do what you can. And wanting a device with all source available, in a form that is easy to (perhaps modify and) compile to a verifiable equivalent of the stock firmware and operating system would be the first obvious step.
How are you going to roll your own? (Score:3, Interesting)
If any of the above is compromised, you are no better off than with a hardware based router.
If you by hardware router mean a device that truly forwards packets in hardware without involving any sort of CPU, then your best guarantee is the economical one. It is cheaper for the vendor to manufacture hardware without snooping capabilities than with.
How about open-source firmware? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm definitely in the "no" camp on this one, but how about after-market, open-source firmware? I run DD-WRT on my good ol' WRT54G, which I trust a heck of a lot more than the OEM code. How far does replacing the stock firmware go towards securing my home network?
Re:It can be a good thing too (Score:5, Interesting)
See, that's the theory, but it can not work in practice the way things are today..
Today, you will notice that an increasing number of business models reject the notion of "I'm the seller and you're the buyer". Most of the corporations with whom you do business don't really see you as the customer any more. For example. If you use Google, are you the customer or are the advertisers? If your data is compromised, that doesn't change anything about the relationship between the seller and the buyer. Same goes for banks, and for Microsoft, Apple, and most of the big tech corporations. While they may sell products to you, they have significant income streams that are deals with the government. In the next six years, Apple computers could have almost a trillion dollars in cash-on-hand. Are they a tech company or a bank? The money they make from their intellectual property doesn't come from you. The money they make from their "strategic partnerships" doesn't come from you.
You're going to buy their products regardless, so it's a lot more important to Apple that they have a good relationship with the government than with you. Because their beneficial sweetheart tax deals could bring in as much as the profit from selling consumer electronics.
Same goes for the telecommunications industry. When you've got telecoms involved in creating content, you're no longer the customer. You're not the consumer, you are the consumable.
This new relationship circumvents every aspect of the notion of "free market", at least any "free market" that involves you. And make no mistake: this new relationship where there is a third party that inserts itself between you and the company from whom you purchase an item is the model of the future. Video gaming, food, intellectual property (of course), transportation, right on down the line. You are being cut out of the equation. There is more profit in making the government happy than there is in making you happy.
Re:It can be a good thing too (Score:5, Interesting)
Bottom line is this: there is no longer a division between the corporate world and government. They are one in the same. They rely on each other and have no reason to take you into consideration.
This makes dealing with the problem as citizens ten times harder. Because if you attack one of the heads of this snake, the head at the other end comes around to bite you. And the current setup is sweet for both corporations and government so they've got no reason to want to change it.
Would that the IETF knew (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a big (and, I personally fear, unfixable) problem for the IETF [youtube.com] and associated Internet bodies. Of course, router security is only a tiny piece of it. Given that RSA has been revealed as taking money from the NSA to weaken security protocols [cnet.com], who knows how deep the rot goes.
One big fight right now is in over the removal of NSA employed Chair of the Crypto Forum Research Group [ietf.org]. There will be more.
Trust for what purpose? (Score:4, Interesting)
For ensuring the safety of your outgoing traffic, it doesn't matter at all whether you can trust your router or not. It's just one step away from a router at your ISP, which you can't trust, and which can be assumed to be malicious.
It's a bit different for ensuring the safety of your internal network, though. If you think there might be any reason why the NSA, government or whoever might want to reach inside your personal network, then you certainly should avoid any closed solutions and keep it under as much control as possible. That router might well hiddenly allow people that know how to access your network without permission.
Router manufacturers also have been caught rewriting pages to insert ads. Here is one example of such a thing [theregister.co.uk].
Not trusting vendors = you give up a lot (Score:3, Interesting)
One solution is to simply not communicate outside of a domain you trust. Go offline. I the extreme, use pen and paper to store information you don't want others to see, and if you need to share that information with others, memorize it and tell it to them in person. As a compromise, use a trusted courier. But even that requires trusting someone.
Basically, adopt the same "off the communications grid" techniques that Osama bin Laden was thought to use.
As I said, you give up a lot, and for 99+% of us, that's not going to be the best option out there. But for a few, it is.
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
es, there is a lot that you can do and I think the closest real answer to the poster's question is to just get an OpenWRT capable router and compile from scratch, but to not trust anyone is simply not an option.
I agree with you, though would optimistically add to your thoughts- "to not trust anyone is simply not an option... yet". Maybe there will come a day when a truly open source and hardware replicator will become possible. Before dismissing me completely, I imagine there would be some years where it looks like an Apple-II 3d printing another Apple-II, but it's seeming more and more possible. And then it's a bootstrapping issue from there to catch back up to modern specs. But I'd have a lot of fun with an Apple-II that I had a lot more trust in of not being infiltrated by the NSA (regardless of whether the original already was)
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
"certainly should run a fresh, clean linux install off a CD every time you start up, to reduce the chances your machine is compromised."
You can also boot an .iso image from a USB or other flash as well as CD and load it entirely to RAM with no persistent home.
Knoppix (nicely polished distro) has had the "toram" option for many years as do other distros it inspired.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Knowing_Knoppix/Advanced_startup_options#Transferring_to_RAM [wikibooks.org]
Commercial ANYTHING cannot be trusted (Score:1, Interesting)
Come on, you sheeple- how many explicit revelations about how the monsters rule over you do you have to read before you get it? You are less than s**t in the eyes of those types of Humans that seek to rise to the top of any business enterprise. In Soviet nations back in the day they had a phrase- "SCUM RISES TO THE TOP".
Amoral and immoral psychologies are universal amongst corporate controllers. "Never give a sucker an even break" is their motto. Then, worse, these worthless individuals hob-nob with people of the same 'class'- powerful religious, government, media, military, 'charity' leaders and the like. They call themselves 'the elite' and define themselves essentially as NOT YOU.
People like Tony Blair have spent the last two decades+ getting 'the elite' to sing from the same page in the same hymn book. A large chunk of Blair's project is the rolling, expanding programs of "TOTAL SURVEILLANCE". Blair instructs his disciples that the better you monitor the sheeple, the better you control them, and the greater chance you will keep their passive support that actually empowers the elite.
All major commercial software is compromised. All major computer hardware, where possible and useful, is compromised. Intel's x86 CPUs have had hardware back-doors for years now (activated by encrypted keys). Intel's hardware 'random' number generators have been designed by the NSA, and can be controlled at will by the chips hardware back-doors, where given sequences of op-codes allow the behaviour of the generator to be altered.
All network equipment is fully back-doored and compromised in multiple ways. Many of these NSA methods are so horrible, form an engineering POV, that the normal functionality of the equipment is horribly degraded even when no intelligence agency hacking is involved.
The biggest open-source projects are also fully compromised. The NSA uses teams of psychologists to exploit the 'autistic' nature of many developers, so that flaming and aggressive behaviour in developers' forums can act as cover for slipping into builds modules of NSA designed code.
But open-source is ONLY vulnerable if the project is so unwieldy, testing the validity of key modules becomes impractical. Small, tight focused code projects like Truecrypt can never be viable targets, so the NSA focuses on psychological propaganda scaring users away from such options, or the simple distribution of NSA hacked binaries from sites under the control of NSA allies (if your favourite tech site "supports the troops", it most certainly supports the NSA and will willingly supply NSA-hacked versions of your favourite utilities).
The US intelligence agencies have a budget running into HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of dollars every year, and rising. Only the tiniest fraction of this spending is given any public coverage. In reality, the NSA has far more money than it know what do do with, and all 'blue sky' ideas to improve full surveillance programs against every single citizen are given real consideration. NSA data centres are hundreds of times larger than you imagine, and are well beyond the capacity required to store FOREVER every single available electronic communication.
The NSA has a desperate need for new, comprehensive data sources- hence Bill Gates' inBloom and Kinect 2 projects. Gates promises to provide, within a decade, everything you can possibly learn about every child, across their entire childhood, in the USA. With the Xbox One, Gates promises to groom the entire population of the USA to accept government cameras and microphones in their own homes.
Of course you MUST accept cameras in your house. You MIGHT be raping your daughter. You MIGHT be beating your wife. You MIGHT be saying the "N-word". You MIGHT be planning resistance against Obama and Gates. You MIGHT be a 'moosleem' terrorist. What right do you have to hide from US justice, you depraved anti-American criminal terrorist scumbag? Don't you read what the owners of Slashdot have their vile shills rant here over and over, with a score of 5?
And they ARE compromised. (Score:5, Interesting)
Modern laptops and desktops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)
One example: Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) [wikipedia.org] and its standard Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) [wikipedia.org], the latter standardized in 1998 and supported by "over 200 hardware vendors". This is built into the northbridge (or, in early models, the Ethernet) chip).
Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature. (I suspect the old Thinkpad is how far back they had to go to avoid it.)
You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.
If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.
Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):
Alternatives to being spied on? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you wish to skirt the NSA, get your router from Huawei, and let the Chinese spy on you instead. If you don't want the Chinese to spy, get something from the usual NSA contributors. Or see if there's anything made in Russia or any country that's totally independent of the US.
How easy is it to get a standard router from Cisco or Juniper, and replace IOS or JunOS w/ something like pFsense, m0n0wall or OpenWRT?
While at it, switch to IPv6, and within a group of people, share a /64 subnet so that even if the NSA spies, they'll find it impossible to source the original source/destination, particularly if dynamic IPs are used.
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
You could always just build a cpu from scratch? http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ [homebrewcpu.com]
Re:No. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you use commodity hardware you could have two CPUs from different manufacturers and compare outputs. Back in the 80s that sort of thing was popular in critical systems. Buy a 68000 CPU from two different sources, preferably from different continents and with each being a unique design. Run the same code on both, and if their outputs don't match for some reason one is faulty. This of course assumes that both don't have identical back-doors.