Big corporations are, by definition, large complex organizations. There is legal, executive management, developers, ops, etc. Hypothesizing about their actions as a singular entity can over simplify things. I don't know about the specifics in the article, but as a general rule there are a number instances where an intelligence agency may approach only a developer, an ops person, or someone in legal to obtain what they want instead of showing up and serving the corporate entity with a NSL. Saying the organization as a whole could provide data exfiltration much more efficiently by other means, does not rule out the possibility that other techniques could be used instead for various non-technical reasons.

You didn't respond to the substance of his objection. The problem with the "NSA backdoor" hypothesis is that it doesn't make logistical sense: it requires the NSA to already have installed software on the victim's computer. If the NSA has installed software on your machine that it can control, you are going to, in the parlance of our times, "get Mossad'd".

Of course, of course, this is unlikely to be an NSA backdoor. But maybe .... </CK_LOUIS>

i dabbled in this api way back in the past so i may be wrong about its capabilities.

skype used to be EXCELLENT at working in most networks, including "locked down" corporate ones. Network admins used to find it notoriously difficult to "ban" on networks.

so relying on skype to exfiltrate info may serve two purposes:

1) use another program's capabilities instead of reinventing the wheel.

2) hide the fact that some random program is doing network access.

skype could be one of a range of data exfiltration mechanisms with different levels of obfuscation.

> it doesn't make logistical sense: it requires the NSA to already have installed software on the victim's computer.

Well, if you have any of the closed-source companies' software on your system (and by definition, that is +/- 310mio citizens, in the US alone), you are sure to have NSA backdoors on your system. Such backdoors certainly do not require manual intervention for them to be exploited on large scale.

Explain?

No one outside of the software provider can audited the code, and presumably even they haven't audited the code. Recently there was the source code backdoor that was suspected to had been placed inside Juniper routers by the NSA. If I remember correctly, it wasn't found because it was hidden on a high right column.

The Juniper backdoor was a bit particular in that it was known that the code in question had been developed and distributed by the NSA. It's more of a stretch to accuse every single vendor of proprietary code in the USA of building NSA back doors into their products. It would require the knowing assistance of tens of thousands of people across those companies.

My point was that you don't actually know, and you don't technically need all the vendors. Just the big ones, and there's not really that many. Even more to the point, you don't even need all of the big ones, just the ones on the biggest network, which honestly probably just one vendor on the whole network due to volume purchase discounts and interoperability concerns.

But more to the point, you don't know what's going on in closed source code. It's trust. However the trust can, and has been violated in the past (whether by the provider or by a third party is immaterial). You just don't know. Now that doesn't mean that open source software is immune. I seem to remember there was a backdoor found in the Linux kernel a few years ago. These things happen, but at least it's easier to audit.

Can you give an example of one of these instances? I've heard of this sort of thing outside of the U.S. (James Bond bribes East German clerk to get the microfilm), but I haven't heard of domestic agencies doing this in the U.S.

Isn't it already disclosed in the Snowden documents that Skype has received NSLs?

Here is a recent article discussing the DEA doing this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/09/30/...

$600k to a particular airline employee, $1 million for a single parcel worker (this was over a few years).

Also there is the various NSA efforts to insert people into the encryption standards process, as well as use cooperative sources within companies to insert vulnerabilities in the commercial encryption systems:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-r...

Also the FBI/Yahoo email program was apparently done by just the CEO, a lawyer, and a few members of the email team. The security team wasn't informed, nor the board.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/04/yahoo-sec...

The DEA program is pretty shocking and a great example, thanks for sharing!

The second one sounds more like an interdiction program, where vulnerabilities are inserted into the devices (this is a thing that was in the Snowden documents). The document gives no details. The highlights on the side are from an NYT journalist, not source material.

I disagree that the last example is an example of that. It's still unclear what the scanning was doing.

The Yahoo thing is a huge deal. Email providers do interception all of the time and have strong procedural controls.

The idea that people could bypass those processes and controls is a tremendous liability that no board would ever approve.

First of all, Skype is Microsoft. Second, they're well known to collaborate already. If NSA wanted a Skype feed, they could have it server or client side.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

Originally, and perhaps at the time this "backdoor" was created, Skype wasn't Microsoft.

Skype was around for along time before Microsoft bought it and changed its architecture and design.

This. It could well have been a backdoor that predates the "superpeer" change MS introduced right after acquisition. Skype was already under pressure from European authorities at the time, to provide intercept capabilities; European criminal networks (mafia etc) were early adopters and everybody knew it.

That collaboration looks like the same mechanism used to adhere to warrants, subpoenas, and NSLs. Do you think that any internet service in the world doesn't have similar mechanisms to comply with law enforcement requests in their home country?

I think you are misleadingly using the word "collaboration".

I also think you have failed to understand the article correctly; there is no reference to client side collection. Take another look.

Agreed. I'm just suggesting if someone were to ask for a client backdoor they could have one, just like they could ask for a server feed.

NKW gave a nice summary of some recent actions. For more historical examples, I highly suggest any of James Bamford's excellent books on the NSA. _The Puzzle Palace_ is a massive tomb, but a very good read. I haven't had a chance to read _Shadow Factory_ yet, but it is in my pile.

How do you think that Juniper VPN compromise got inserted into the code?

In the "Athens" affair, most commentators dismissed CIA involvement saying that if the US gov needed the data, they could just ask.

Well after the investigation went through and some data came out regarding the Vodafone server hack it was clear that the organizations that could pull something like this, there like ... Maybe 5 with CIA the most likely candidate.

So, we like to oversimplify but life is way more complicated.

BTW I think that the Athens affair is one of the top 3 hacking stories that I know of.

Skype used to be a peer-to-peer application and did not use nor require any "central" servers.

Then, Microsoft bought it and that all changed.

Disclaimer: ex Skype employee here

While this simple reasoning is appealing, I have to disagree. Both its premises (Skype was peer to peer before MS) and conclusion (MS made it a client-server system because Evil).

- Real peer to peer on internet is not really possible, since most end users are behind NAT. Skype resorts to a number of hole punching techniques, but really only uses STUN/ICE, effectively using super-nodes as relay for sessions. This directly means that all these communication are transiting through a third party, and not peer to peer.

- Super-nodes used to be regular end users (with some simple algorithm to elect as supernode users with high up-time, high throughput. Fun fact: only windows client users were possible super-nodes). This model proved to be too fragile. In case the network falls down (which happened some years ago), then the super-nodes are no longer available, and get instantly DoS when coming back up due to every other node trying to get back. This is a vicious cycle in which the network cannot get back up. So for a long time now (before MS) super-nodes are just backed by Skype-hosted servers in data-centers.

- Thin clients are a real thing in e.g. the african market, where a lot of very old phones are still in circulation, no "apps" are possible. Think of your old Nokia 3310.

- Persistent group chats. Users wanted it.

- And on a more "political" aspect: MS needed to promote its cloud infrastructure (Azure), lower its physical resources fingerprint (get rid of Skype datacenters), and unify its technical stack (Linux/C++ now Windows/C#)

Skype claimed that the move to central servers was because peer-to-peer would not work on smartphones which were becoming their user base.

The old Skype for Windows was really locked and obfuscated. I remember that it would not even start on my PC with a debugger installed, even though it was not running in the debugger.

You forget that Skype used to be peer-to-peer.