Samir Khosla

Based on commentaries and exchanges since he became president, one may conclude that Donald Trump believes that cyber-security procedures may be too inconvenient and obstructive for the efficient conduct of work. His leanings may be evident via reports of his continued use of his private mobile phone and could be a result of his decades-long practice of not using email, earning him the moniker of “computer and email skeptic-in-chief.” There has been a spate of media coverage in recent days that highlights the repercussions of Trump campaign members’ choices relating to usage of public encrypted communication apps. The underlying conclusion of the media coverage illustrates that user choices can render even the most sophisticated encrypted communication technologies useless and lay bare confidential communications. Additionally, it becomes clear that since public encrypted messaging applications don’t allow for configuration or adaptation to an organization’s policies/compliance, a single user’s actions on an app such as Whats App can unravel the security/confidentiality of an organization, rendering it powerless to mitigate and prevent such an outcome. In the case of private encrypted messaging apps, organizations can enforce policies and control user access, information flow and data storage – a situation made clear by the banning of public encrypted messaging apps on work devices by several European organizations including the German automobile giant Continental AG.

Recently, federal prosecutors obtained access to communications, which were copies of messages exchanged by one of President Trump’s past top associates, via supposedly impenetrable “end-to-end encrypted” apps such as Whats App and Signal. The governmental agents’ ability to access historical information, exchanged via end-to-end encrypted public messaging applications calls for a moment of reflection about the user’s responsibility in protecting one’s self through their choices and actions. While technology provides the means for one to communicate securely, a user’s actions and methodologies can compromise even the best technology.

Repercussions of the user’s actions can be severe and, in this case, have resulted in cementing the argument made by federal prosecutors regarding Paul Manafort’s “witness tampering” actions, in a bid to influence the potential testimony of witnesses in Robert Muller’s inquiry into Russian collusion by members of the Trump campaign. A similar situation has emerged in the case against Michael Cohen, who also allegedly utilized end-to-end encrypted software to conduct communications of a dubious nature.

Publicly reported information shows that a gigantic amount of information was unearthed by the federal prosecutors – approximately 700 pages of Whats App and Signal communications along with call logs. Regardless of the content and context of the cases against various American individuals in the Russian collusion case, the government’s ability to access the content of the end-to-end encrypted information as well as meta information about that communication is a wake-up moment of users of such technologies.

In the case of Manafort, the evidence was damning enough to lead to his imprisonment. While suspense hangs over the next action in Cohen’s case, one may assume the outcome will only be negative in his case too. In recent days, Trump’s old campaign supporter Sam Nunberg was also asked to hand over his smartphones at the request of the FBI. Those individuals who communicated over end-to-end encrypted applications assuming that the security and confidentiality of their exchanges were sacrosanct are about to learn a harsh lesson about the promises and small-print of technology. And, while it is alleged that the actions of these individuals were nefarious and pointed to illegal activities, MOST users of Whats App, Signal, Telegram, Wire and other apps are law-abiding individuals, employees or business people simply seeking to secure the confidentiality of their information and communications, using secure messaging apps. What should these users learn from the developments impacting individuals in Trump’s world?

These instances expose the reality that, beyond the Hollywood action movie NSA/CIA style technological means that could be used to exploit weaknesses within the hardware or software of a system, the security and penetrability of public encrypted messaging apps is determined to a large extent by the actions of the user. From a security perspective, users act based on their cyber-security awareness level; a high level of awareness could help them understand the repercussions of their actions, a lack of awareness would lead to a result, similar to the instances of Mr. Cohen and Mr. Manafort, where even the most secure software failed to provide them the protection they sought.

The details of these instances highlight certain fundamental facts about end-to-end encryption, particularly that information is only encrypted between two ends, while it is in transit. However, information typically resides completely unencrypted at both, the sender and receiver’s ends. In these instances, anyone gaining access to an endpoint could arguably gain access to the information in question. Additionally, if either the sender or receiver decides to archive or backup the communication log, federal prosecutors or malicious actors would not need space age/science fiction technologies such as quantum-computing to break through strong encryption, they just would need to gain access to the archive of historical communication from the storage provider. For enterprises this could spell disaster as leakage of confidential or sensitive information could have severe detrimental consequences.

In conclusion, communication requires at least two individuals to interact and if either one of those parties is not well informed about cyber-security and makes choices such as maintaining an easily accessible archive of information over public messaging apps, some or all of the information in question may be compromised. Private secure messaging apps can help organizations by allowing user related and other risk mitigation through administrative capabilities, allowing enforcement of restrictions such as debarring of third party archiving.

Reference Article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-202/2018/06/18/the-cybersecurity-202-trump-associates-may-need-a-lesson-on-how-to-use-their-encrypted-apps/5b2675f91b326b3967989b28/?utm_term=.d31bee903ea4

Samir Khosla

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عرض ملف Samir الشخصي الكامل

ملفات شخصية أخرى مشابهة

Helene Krieff

Reto Stuber

Arthur W. Nordlie

Christopher S. Kälin

Eric FUMEAUX

Stefano Pellandini

Daniel Corrales

Christoph Frei

Bernard Pittet

Michael PLATEN

Peter E. Bodmer

Christophe Barman

Daniela Beyrouti

Beat Fey

Ilaria Ciaramella

Igor Testen

Alain J. Platevoet

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أعضاء آخرون يحملون اسم ⁦⁩Samir Khosla

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الإمارات العربية المتحدة
٢٠ ألف متابع أكثر من 500 زميل