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by aftbit 293 days ago
Most protocols that I use day-to-day are secure against simple passive interception. Either SSH or TLS encrypts just about every packet that leaves my network. This got much better with DNS over HTTPS (or TLS before that). Of course these protocols are sometimes susceptible to downgrade attacks, man in the middle compromises, etc, but none of that would be available to someone who was running a pcap without modifying the traffic streams.

So how would a simple MD attack affect me? Any sort of CALEA attack on a higher protocol layer (e.g. compromising Gmail at Google instead of capturing their traffic) would make sense, but not a pcap.
4 comments
michael1999 293 days ago
That’s what makes CALEA so toxic. Any covered comms must be effectively-plain-text, or it doesn’t work. Once you impose a plain-text architecture, a mass-breach is inevitable.
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dvno42 293 days ago
Definitely, I would hope these kinds of systems become less useful with more encryption. I imagine, these kinds of collections I mentioned above are just one of many angles used in an investigation with this particular angle being for correlation and supporting evidence against a request to bookface, cloudflare, etc.

edit these network devices probably also carry voip/voice trunks from enterprise and possibly carriers such as VZW. No telling if those are encrypted or not. If China is able to tap that using these CALEA systems, I could see how that would be a big deal for stealing IP/secrets.

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michael1999 293 days ago
No. That’s what makes CALEA so damaging. It is ILLEGAL to encrypt covered traffic in a way that isn’t intercept-able by any random sheriff’s office in any county of the USA.
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shrubble 292 days ago
As far as I know, all telecommunications companies in the USA do not encrypt phone calls in the core of their networks; they may have TLS to/from the customers to the SBC (session border controller, a firewall/terminating point for customers), but once it’s past that point, it’s all sent in the clear.
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esseph 292 days ago
SMS TOTP

Header decryption data (protocol, source, target)

Any phone calls

Etc.

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