Will Security Firms Detect Police Spyware?

cnet-declan writes "A recent appeals court case dealt with Drug Enforcement Administration agents using a key logger to investigate a suspect using PGP and Hushmail. That invites the obvious question: Will security companies ever intentionally overlook police spyware? There were somewhat-muddled reports in 2001 that Symantec and McAfee would do just that, so over at News.com we figured we'd do a survey of the top 13 security firms. We asked them if it is their policy to detect policeware. Notably, Check Point said it would 'afford law enforcement' the courtesy of whitelisting if requested. We've also posted the full results, with the companies' complete answers. Another question we asked is if they have ever received a court order requiring them to overlook police key loggers or spyware. Symantec, IBM, Kaspersky, and others said no. Only Microsoft and McAfee refused to answer."

Security

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Re:Security

Decoded because tinfoiling or making a point this way is just plain annoying... :-p

"Government agencies and backdoors in technology products have a long and frequently clandestine relationship. One 1995 expose by the Baltimore Sun described how the National Security Agency persuaded a Swiss firm, Crypto, to build backdoors into its encryption devices. In his 1982 book, The Puzzle Palace, author James Bamford described how the NSA's predecessor in 1945 coerced Western Union, RCA and ITT Communications to turn over telegraph traffic to the feds."

With Bush in office you can only expect more of the same.

Would you TRUST their answers if they said "no"?

I don't trust any of them NOT to do whatever the cops/government want(s).

Open Source all the way.

TFA didn't ask about National Security Letters

The question was "Have you ever received such a court order signed by a judge...".
But if what they had received instead was a NSL, they would be under a gag provision (with *jail* as the penalty) to not mention anything about it.

That's only in Amerika of course.

Re:TFA didn't ask about National Security Letters

A friend of mine once worked in a job that required him to have signed the Official Secrets Act (this was in the UK, many years ago). He told the the following story: I don't know whether it was true.

Once you have signed the act, you are not allowed to reveal certain official secrets. He read the act and discovered that the fact that he had signed the act would be one of the official secrets that he was not allowed to reveal.
So, whenever he was asked whether he had signed the act, he would say "under section x.y of the act, I am not allowed to tell you that". Everyone took this to mean "yes", and duly proceeded to reveal their various secrets to him. Of course, he had never signed the act.

Re:TFA didn't ask about National Security Letters

Totalitarian dictatorships absolutely would do this. But then, that's actually my point.

New solution

I am going to send all my private messages by owl from now on.

Adaware????

Will Adaware detect Police spyware? I wonder.....

note to self

"Check Point said it would 'afford law enforcement' the courtesy of whitelisting if requested"

never buy anything from check point.

Re:note to self

If they have a court order (with proper oversight), I don't see a problem with this

Read a newspaper in the last few years? Oversight is pretty much non-existent anymore.

Re:note to self

All that needs to be done is for a hacker to find out what specific software is used by the police, and subvert it so that the hacker can use it to attack people while the spyware detector software purposely ignores it, thinking that it is from the police.

--jeffk++

Re:note to self

Problem, easy, hmm, police spyware, the magic box solution, the code can't ever be copied and used for criminal purposes, less than honest law enforcement officers would never ever sell copies of the program for other people to use, never ever.

Technically law enforcement is giving the code away free, to the very criminals we should be endeavouring to keep the code away from, all they have to do is find it and get a cracker to reverse engineer it.

A back door is a back door is a back door, when you pay for security software you pay for a complete solution, not some thing that leaks like a sieve. Security companies either declare the holes in the package or they knowingly commit fraud about the security of the software that they are providing.

Basically if the law enforcement want to poke their sticky beaks in, they need to whack in a bit of hardware and have the warrant to go along with it, software is just a bull shit lazy trap waiting to blow up in their and our faces.

Re:note to self

Warrants should be required for the police to install the keylogger, and a court order or similar should be required for the AV program vendor to assist. If the necessary warrants and orders are in place, by all means, they ought to comply. But CheckPoint has said they don't feel a need to wait for such -- just the say-so of the police. That way lies abuse of power.

Re:note to self

You *have* noticed what kind of oversight is being provided these days? When ANY is provided...

Oversight essentially means they run back to the office and time-stamp a preprinted form. There's a little more involved than that, but not much. They get to choose the most pliable judge available...and there are some who are pretty pliable.

The bizarre thing is that even THAT much oversight is seen as too much by those in charge of the snooping agencies. And it's not usually because of urgency. (As I recall they can get special exemptions for planting a bug on a target of opportunity...retroactive permission.)

The current moral corruption of the police appears to extend all the way from the local level to the federal. (I hope your local police are still honest. If so, count yourself lucky...or uninformed.)

This current level of corruption probably reaches back to Nixon's Imperial Presidency, and before him to FDR's centralization of the government. And before him, also. (Notice that it's not specific to any one party. What one party does, the other party rarely repeals.) With the removal of habeas corpus it's barely disguised any more. This *IS* a police state. So far it's a more humane one than most of it's predecessors, but it has the diagnostic features. Britain is, or appears to be headed, the same way.

Probably this is because of two basic features:
1) Population density makes it more difficult to control people, and
2) The removal of a frontier means that if the powers that be get mad at you, there's no place to escape to.
Ostensibly these two factors pull in opposite directions, but actually the freedom of the frontier had a back-transference that lead to greater liberty in the sessile population.

What can be done? Solutions seem either difficult or undesirable. Either drastically decrease the population (H5N1 may attempt this solution), or create a new frontier (which must be reachable at least by the middle class, if not by the impoverished). Space travel appears too expensive for the foreseeable future. Ditto for under-sea colonies. And it has to be a meat-space frontier. Virtual realities don't have the same "getting out from under the thumb of an oppressive government" effect (except in fantasy...which isn't sufficient).

Don't play stupid..

Some technologies are simply too easily abused. You want to check my system for criminal activity? Fine. Get a warrant and confiscate it. I don't think this is anti 5-0. This is checks and balances. There are tons of great people involved in law enforcement, but adding tools and acceptions like this is just taking another needless step down a slippery slope.

We keep gleefully throwing away our rights in the name of what? Fear? That's bad rationale. Our founding fathers must be turning in their graves.

Re:note to self

I don't totally disagree in theory, but as I see it,the problem with this is similar to the problem with encryption key escrow: If there's a hole in the security for the "good guys" the "bad guys" will figure out how to exploit it. If the government has a way to get your encryption keys, even assuming that they're always on their best behavior, you can bet that a smart kid somewhere will figure out how to get your keys as well, and you can't assume that he'll be on his best behavior. Likewise, if you program a blind spot into a virus / malware scanner, I don't think it's unreasonable to bet that the same kid will figure out a way to make his malware look benign enough to slip through the same hole.

It's a simple rule of security: If there's a low security path, the bad guys will take it. That's how they win. Assuming otherwise is silly.

Re:note to self

So I presume you are against the police using spyware as a tool in all circumstances?

This isn't about how and when police should use wiretaps. It is about companies ignoring their ethical obligation to detect any and all "spyware." Hence the note to self: "Never by anything from Checkpoint" They either can't be trusted to do the job you pay them to do.

For an example of why this whitelisting is a problem regardless of whether or not individual wiretapping cases are legit: What if a criminal decides to utilize the police spyware? How hard can it be to take a machine has been "bugged" by the police, find the binary, and copy it for your own use... and do your dirty work undetected? All it takes is one clever hacker to dissect the police keylogger and distribute it amongst his friends....

-matthew

Re:note to self

Besides, if they'll whitelist the police, they'll whitelist Sony...as many did.

Re:note to self

So I presume you are against the police using spyware as a tool in all circumstances?

Yes, unless they have a proper warrant, legally issued by an actual judge. Refer to the 4th amendment.

Would your opinion change if the Police had a warrant?

A warrant means oversight. I'm fine with that. Again, refer to the 4th.

If you daughter were kidnapped, would you protest them using her cel phone to track her?

My only protest is that you are resorting to emotions instead of continuing intelligent debate. In any case, it's a clear non-sequitur (and poorly laid trap) and has no place in the discussion.

Fastens buckle on tinfoil hat

I'm not normally given to conspiracies, but this is ridiculous. The fact that we're having this conversation means that at least someone is concerned about the possibility of Government key loggers not being detected, and if it's taken someone outside of gov't this long to discuss it then I feel certain that the gov't itself has been thinking about this for some time.

These companies will cave to whatever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction for the investigation quicker than the last Harry Potter book hit the torrents. The only possible exception would be those AV companies that are immediately outside of the grasp of the agency involved. I don't even think that those companies are safe because their own governments would likely bear pressure to comply.

Well, this isn't exactly new...

Seriously - there's even a good reason why [wikipedia.org] MSFT doesn't really want to talk about it.

/P

Paradox

If they do whitelist gov't spyware, they will probably also lie about it.

I think modern government wouldn't do its own spying, but would find a subcontractor.

Whitelisting entities?

As far as I am concerned, no company that white-lists "entities" is in security.

White-listing processes/applications/files/data is not global, and is the only level for security. White-listing a company or organization is never an option. It is politics.

The respondents weaseled

You'll notice that when asked about key loggers they started talking about methods of detection other than signature recognition. Kaspersky even mentioned that he wasn't talking about signature recognition which is the only reliable method.

You can take this as a hint that none of the companies is distributing signatures of the programs that the government uses.

what happens if it gets into the wrong hands

sounds like a bad idea to me. What happens if the government spyware is in the wrong hands. Seems to me this would be very dangerous and open up a can of worms to someone hoping to protect their computer. An example is Encase FIM (just for law enforcement FBI/Police/etc) which has a remote stealth agent for connecting to evidence computers. This is not picked up by scanners but im sure its available on warez sites which probably means its not just in intended hands. In the end i want an AV tool that can tell me if anything potentially dangerous is going on with my computer. The AV tool wont be able to discern if the user of the spyware has good or bad intentions so it shouldnt try (especially based on the author of the spyware).

Undetectable Policeware = Undetectable Malware

If policeware gets a free pass to do things that, done by other parties, would be considered "malicious", then other malware will quickly begin to disguise itself as policeware to avoid detection.

Well that's funny...

Because the software can then be captured by the hackers then used on the government systems, which will have their own software used against them.

This is exactly like the key-to-the-city thing. If that key gets stolen...

In the end, it won't work. Government is a business providing a service at the barrel of a gun and as we've seen countless time, the free market never choses the violent solution.

Have you actually *spied* on users for the gov't?

I'd like to see them ask that question. After all, virus checkers see every file on your disk, every email you get and send, every IM chat. So it's a natural point of leverage for any kind of spying. Only the OS itself would be a better target.

And it's even better than whitelisting, because you can do a blanket search of *everyone* using the virus checker for interesting keywords or known-enemy email addresses. Hey Poindexter, get on it!

The importance of open source...

This highlights the needs for more open source/public software. Whether it is voting machines or spyware scanners. Some things can't reliably be left to commercial vendors with closed source.

-matthew

Police spyware used by the dark side?

1. Whitelist police spyware
2. Crim gets hold of police spyware
3. Crim gets pwns your machine, steals your identity and makes your life a living hell for the next 3 years or more.

If you paid for a piece of anti-spyware and they leave a backdoor open like this, isn't that a case of negligence?

Immaterial

If reputable companies do it, someone will write something to scan for them. Its not like there is only 1 company in business who has a 100% market share.

Sony Rootkit....

Sounds like the Government is planning to implant a rootkit in every single computer or atleast leave a vulnerability/flaw in code (very easy to do with Vista since its so new) which will allow them to do so.

Time for everyone to switch to Linux. The more eyeballs we can get on code the more likely someone isnt able to sneak shit like this in.

List of Whitelists PLEASE...

What I'd like to see is a actual accounting of "whitelisted" programs, ones that have attained the appropriate certificate.

Where is the search warrant?

Oh, you don't have one. Policeware... DELETED!

Hack the BIOS.

Given that a target could be using multiple OSes, reformating, etc, etc.... wouldn't installing a compromised BIOS make more sense? How could you know that this wasn't already the case... unless of course you using LinuxBIOS built from your own (validated) source.

Or going the hardware route - installing an inline keylogger is a bit noticable, but what if this (just the chip+wires) was installed inside the PC or keyboard case?

Munge.

This says something for PGP

Police actually had to brake in the persons' office to install the keylogger, in order to get their PGP password. This means PGP is at least quite good. However, the article implies that PGP is breakable with a bit of time and effort: Coffey asserted that the DEA needed "real-time and meaningful access" and that's why they monitored for the keys.

-1, Moot

Unlike traditional malware, "policeware" would only be present on the target machine(s), rather than spread to any and every computer, so it's extremely unlikely that AV vendors would ever receive a sample. No sample means it would continue to go undetected, provided it was designed to go undetected in the first place.

And how often do you look at the back of your computer [google.com]? How often do you think the average user does, or would even notice anything out of the ordinary if they were staring right at one? Sure, this is more difficult on a laptop since it would have to be opened, but it would also be even more discreet. I'm not aware of any products on the market for laptops, but I'm sure LE could commission one to be made, if necessary.

The point is, it would be an incompetent department indeed which needed cooperation from AV suppliers to keep their surveillance methods discreet.

Then based on the responses...

Which security programs would you use? Which ones would you recommend to less tech-savvy friends and family? Assuming - The person is a "user" not power, super or otherwise having extra abilities or knowledge The machine is a windows pc (lets say XP for argument's sake) The user is willing to use what you recommend or install for a product price range of $0-$30US Thus far I have gone for the basic "freebie suite": AVG Free, Zone Alarm Free, Ad-Aware and Spybot. I also run these on my windows box so I am able to help if anyone has a question (about a dozen friends and family members)

The obvious reason they shouldn't

Once the malware is identified, it can be copied and manipulated to run on systems with impunity while it's being ignored by the AV software. It would be reckless to the point of being ineffective forever.

McAfee and Symantec dropped the ball

Consider what happened with the SONY rootkit? Bruce Schneier (Cryptography and Security Expert) reported that Symantec and McAfee who both knew about the SONY rootkit did not add it to their signatures file. Apparently if SONY hacks your computer, that's fine with them! They only updated their files once SONY themselves had retracted the rootkit. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sony s_drm_rootk.html [schneier.com]

If Symantec and McAfee will let SONY hack your PC, they'll let the government hack your PC.

Can anyone recommend a virus scanner that looks after the customer rather than the virus companies one-day maybe potential business partners if they get lucky?

Brilliant!

1) AV companies whitelist trojan used by government agents.
2) government agents install said trojan on all the bad-guys computers.

So now all the known bad guys have copies of a trojan that is whitelisted by the AV software...
What could possibly go wrong?
That's exactly the level of intelligence I've come to expect from this government.

Oh wait, maybe they'll copyright the the trojan so the bad guys can't copy it and use it on other computers...

Any AV company that co-operates with such a plan is incompetent.

This isn't about being against Law Enforcement.

A company providing protection from keyloggers and other tools that are installed without the user's consent (malware) should not be making exceptions for anything that would otherwise be considered malware.

This reminds me of the same arguments that were made for the "clipper chip". That is: "Encryption is OK as long as law enforcement has a back door". The non-technical amongst us would proclaim that "You're against Law Enforcement if you don't support some kind of key escrow service." Security tools that are designed with weaknesses built in are not good security tools.

The current crop of anti-malware tools are already not adequate. Vendors should err on the side of caution and flag anything that is monitoring keystrokes or matches signatures without concern about who installed it, or whether or not it is an application that is "whitelisted" for keylogging. To do otherwise invites criminals to take advantage of that circumstance and ensure that the malware they use appears whitelisted.

I don't care about your political views or your opinions about whether or not a particular administration or government is "Good or Evil". I'm all for law enforcement using necessary (legal) means to enforce the laws ... including installing keyloggers. But having a security vendor be open to the idea of intentionally weakening their application is reason enough for me to not renew my ZoneAlarm license.

A way around the answer "no"

Of course, if they have already volunteered to whitelist said police and federal keyloggers, spyware, etc, then they never would have gotten any court orders. So by answering the question asked, it still leaves the possibility of them not searching for and destroying "legal" spyware.

Why use foreign Anti-Spyware, of course

Unless there's a world-wide conspiracy or a single supplier of "police spyware" in the world, Anti-Spyware products from other countries will not follow "don't detect us" order (and, I bet, there would be one or two posts with "would you look at that?!" notes, listing exactly what "please don't detect us" not says).
Of course it also implies that gov-spyware is used in such mass quantities that at least one or more somewhat knowledgeable people find that something is wrong and involve anti-virus/spyware vendors.
So... those who believe in world-wide conspiracy -- there is nothing to protect you (otherwise it wouldn't be ww-c ;) )
Those who are paranoid -- use anti-virus/spyware kits from different countries. Kill everything suspicious (perhaps including one or two of those anti-virus programs that point at each other as a threat)
Everyone else... panic for a week, then move on to the new threat/panic/book/movie :)

Are whitelists readable?

A question. If a malware detector wants to avoid detecting government malware, would they need to explicitly whitelist it or merely fail to blacklist it?

If they do whitelist government malware, is it possible to read the whitelist and extract the signatures of the whitelisted malware - and then search your system using a modified scanner and the signature they so thoughtfully provided?

What about GPS on cars

What about tracking systems on cars that police install, or bugs in your home.

is it legal to remove them if found? I would destroy them all, uninstall it etc. But is it legal to do so?

Generic test?

Is there such a thing as a generic test for keyloggers? Perhaps some way to profile a known-clean system and then spot the difference in some aspect of performance if a keylogger is subsequently inserted? If the keylogger is rootkit-like it may be hard to spot in the small space of memory it would require. But wouldn't it usually introduce some slight delay in the speed of keyboard input getting to the intended program? Is there any way to test for that without the test program itself getting the same slightly-delayed input, with no way to measure when the key actually made contact? Can keyboard input be simulated in a way that would send it through any installed keylogger, and so reveal it?

Alternately, the keylogger is most likely storing the logged keys either in clear or in isomorphic form to the input. So if you inserted your own keylogger into the system, what would it take to scan memory (and drives?) for matches on samples of what your own keylogger captures? Keyloggers aren't going to want to be burdened with heavy encryption to avoid this scanning, since that would add enough system load to make them more spottable by other means. Obviously you'd have to mask out the legitimate memory locations of, say, your word processor the input's going to - which would miss a keylogger patched into your word processor.

Is anyone working on a way to harden systems against this whole category? (Yeah, key-logging dongles are yet another thing. Software insertion is the question I'm addressing.)

Competition to the rescue!

This does seem like a very valid concern, but the key point missed in the summary is that there are countries and governments besides America. (shocking, I know)

Just like America has a vested interest in preventing the Russians/Chinese/Terrorists/etc from spying on us by detecting their keyloggers (but whitelisting their own), other countries will similarly want to keep out America's malware.

So I guess the trick is to install two A/V programs, from two different nations.

Let's be sensible here

I just hope the politicians (who invariably are usually the ones with the least knowledge of computers) come to their minds before the big desaster strikes.

It's not so much an issue of security and anti-malware vendors. A "government trojan" has the potential to become a diplomatic desaster. I mean, ponder the consequences.

Aside from the political problem that could rise when such a trojan is detected (and I deliberately don't write "if". "When" is the word of choice, because it will be detected, no matter whether AV vendors ignore it, because they must or because they want to 'help their country'), which can quickly destroy the rest of support a government has from its subjects, the foreign politics are much more endangered.

Imagine the US writing a keylogging and content sniffing trojan. Said trojan is then issued to a potential suspect. Said suspect finds it and forwards it via spam mail to Chinese companies and government. There it's detected, dissected and analyzed, to find that it's a keylogger reporting to the NSA.

Can you imagine the international implications?

For European governments, the headaches get even worse. Kaspersky said they won't care (and I believe them. I mean, if I was in Russia and had the backing of the government there, I wouldn't care about "do not find" letters from some minor country in Europe either). European AV researchers will be in Den Hague immediately when a "you must not find" letter hits their desk, and sue for unfair competition situations. And then, the cat IS out of the box. Dead or alive.

What governments around the world didn't get yet is that the success of trojans lies on their spreading. A trojan gets sent to a few thousand targets, a tenth of a percent of which actually click on it and infect themselves. The current very popular and successful form of infecting where you manipulate webpages to spread your malware is definitly out for targeted infections either, you'd have no control over who gets infected.

So if you send your "targeted" trojan to a thousand suspects, only ONE of them on average will actually be infected. C