Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
Arnold G. Reinhold [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Army actually has a training course (from 1990) on-line that describes such a system in detail. The cipher system, called DRYAD is covered in https://hosta.atsc.eustis.army.mil/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/accp/is1100/ch4.htm . Your description fits, it sounds like DRYAD. rest of good post, snipped, except:- Consider these difficulties: it was *banned* to use any form of comsec that wasn't centrally approved. No personal code words, no CB radios, no knicknames, no nothing... (In practice there was some leakage, I recall on my last exercise, logistics back to the battalion HQ in the city was handled over a cellular phone!) I wonder if such bans are intended to make sure the military can read the traffic of its own soldiers as much as they are to protect against enemy exploits. :-) The reason was that sigint on the other side could note particular differences from standard procedure, and use that to track units up and down the front. For the same reason, all plan names are generated randomly, from a dictionary program in HQ; sigint people could derive a lot of clues from the personally picked plan names. (Hence you can always tell when the professionals have lost control, as the plan names become political.) iang - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
At 2:15 PM -0500 4/1/03, Ian Grigg wrote: Some comments from about a decade ago. The way it used to work in the Army (that I was in) within a battalion, is that there was a little code book, with a sheet for a 6 hour stretch. Each sheet has a simple matrix for encoding letters, etc. Everyone had the same sheet, and they were created centrally and distributed from there. If any sheets were lost, it was a major disaster. All soldiers were taught to code up the messages, it was one of the more boring lessons. In practice, corporals and seargeants did most of the coding, but it was still a slow and cumbersome process. The Army actually has a training course (from 1990) on-line that describes such a system in detail. The cipher system, called DRYAD is covered in https://hosta.atsc.eustis.army.mil/cgi-bin/atdl.dll/accp/is1100/ch4.htm - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
Eric Rescorla wrote: John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Remember, the cypherpunks ... secured any Web traffic Credit where it's due. Netscape was responsible for this. Only for the client side (and the protocol, of course). Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit. - Robert Woodruff - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 07:38:29PM -0500, reusch wrote: | Via the Cryptome, http://www.cryptome.org/, RU sure, look | at http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news082.htm. | | I'm amazed at their claims of radio interception. One would | expect that all US military communications, even trivial ones, | are strongly encrypted, given the ease of doing this. Someone, | more well informed, please reassure me that this is the case. The ease of doing what? Applying DES with a known key? Key management is hard. Doing key lookups, cert chain management, etc, to NSA level stadards is expensive. Etc. The non-availability of good, cheap, easy to use crypto in a COTS package is the legacy of the ITAR and EAR. That there is a lack of deployed crypto in the US military should be unsuprising. Adam -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
reusch[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Via the Cryptome, http://www.cryptome.org/, RU sure, look at http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news082.htm. I'm amazed at their claims of radio interception. One would expect that all US military communications, even trivial ones, are strongly encrypted, given the ease of doing this. Someone, more well informed, please reassure me that this is the case. Otherwise, yet another thing is very wrong about this war and the infrastructure that supports it. -MFR There are a lot of people who don't consider this source credible. After the site was cited on the Interesting People list, the following appeared. I'll leave it up to the reader as to who to believe. Peter From: Stephen D. Poe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Venik iraqwar.ru Follow-Ups To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 21:42:48 -0600 Organization: Nautilus Solutions Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dave - There's currently several newsgroup threads discussing iraqwar.ru (see sci.military.naval:The credibility of Iraqwar.ru or lack thereof and smn:Intel evaluation 2003.03.25, in rec.aviation.military:The Noted Waterhead: Venik and even in alt.engr.exploisves:Russian analysis of the ongoing battles in Iraq). Regarding Venik and his site at http://www.aeronautics.ru; I suggest a few minutes spent on Google will be informative. He's well know to both sci.military.naval and rec.aviation.military posters and lurkers. Historically he's not known for his accuracy. He's probably best known for his heated assertions during the Yugoslavia conflict as to how many planes NATO lost, NATO's deliberate targeting of civilian targets, and NATO's use of chemical weapons. His claims of multiple shoot-downs of everything from F-16s to B-2s and B-52s were somewhat quickly quashed given the hobby of tail spotters worldwide. Many of his other claims, such as A NATO pilot admits that civilian targets were deliberately attacked during the operation Allied Force and that NATO aviation used chemical weapons were likewise not later confirmed. See: http://www.aeronautics.ru/natodown.htm and a Google search for Venick B-2 Shoot Down as examples. I would have to view anything with his name associated with it with suspicion. -- Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
On Sun, 30 Mar 2003, reusch wrote: I'm amazed at their claims of radio interception. One would expect that all US military communications, even trivial ones, Trivial ones are voice radio. Nontrivially to encrypt (mil people tend to be conservative), unlike teletype (I've used NEMP-proof perforated tape, teletypes and electromechanical rotor crypto keyed by a wire plug box in 1988's Bundeswehr). are strongly encrypted, given the ease of doing this. Someone, more well informed, please reassure me that this is the case. While there's no doubt comm is being intercepted the www.aeronautics.ru main analyst (forgot his name) is purported to be not very credible. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
At 7:38 PM -0500 3/30/03, reusch wrote: Via the Cryptome, http://www.cryptome.org/, RU sure, look at http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news082.htm. I showed this link to a friend who fixes helicopters for the Army/Marines. He was incredulous at first, but then said, Oh, they probably just turned off the crypto. There's a switch to do that. Sometimes you have to do that if things screw up. He went on to talk about crypto as if it was something like fuel or food. He said, They probably loaded up 4 or 5 days of crypto at the beginning, but then they had to turn it off after the supply lines got muddled. So this would be consistent with some key management structures but not with others. If you give a unit a good random number source and diffie-hellman, they should be able to go the entire war without running out of crypto. But I don't know if the US military embraces the kind of hierarchy-free key management imagined by cypherpunks. Of course, many of the details from the Russian could be gathered from raw traffic analysis. It's easy to count messages and triangulate to figure out where US troops are massing. It's also easy to tell that an absence of messages from the interior of the city means that the US troops haven't entered yet. The crypto may cloak the details of the messages, but those details may not be too important. (I wouldn't be surprised if they carried some news of the NCAA basketball tournament, for instance.) -Peter - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 07:38:29PM -0500, reusch wrote: I'm amazed at their claims of radio interception. One would expect that all US military communications, even trivial ones, are strongly encrypted, given the ease of doing this. Someone, more well informed, please reassure me that this is the case. It's not the case. I routinely listen in on communications. Most of the planes have either KY-57 or Have Quick. The KY is digital and probably better than DES encryption. Adequate except for stupidly using AM (Amplidude Modulation, aka ancient modulation) which along with poor maintenance makes it often unusable. Have Quick is actually anti-jam and often mistaken for encryption. Likely the Russians can read it. The real problem is that flaky encrypted comms are a tactical problem so it is often better to use clear comms when time is the issue. Not too helpful to know what's about to happen if you can't do anything about it anyway. Otherwise, yet another thing is very wrong about this war and the infrastructure that supports it. -MFR It's amazing to me to listen to engineers try a test 15 times and then when it finally works, declare victory and go on to the next one. The military industrial complex is about money, not reliable high-tech systems. I was more impressed with American expertise 40 years ago than I am now. -- - | 73,E-mail | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | Lyn Kennedywebpage | http://home.earthlink.net/~lrkn | | K5QWB ICBM | 32.5 North 96.9 West| ---Livin' on an information dirt road a few miles off the superhighway--- - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
I'm amazed at their claims of radio interception. 1. Look for plaintext. This was rule #1 stated by Robert Morris Sr. in his lecture to the annual Crypto conference after retiring as NSA's chief scientist. You'd be amazed how much of it is floating around out there, even in military communications. 2. Wars are great opportunities to learn what other folks are doing for communications security. Whether or not you are a belligerant in the war, you clearly want to be focusing your interception capabilities on that battlefield and its supply and command trails. Besides operational errors made under stress, which can compromise whole systems, you just learn what works and what doesn't work among the fielded systems. And what works or not in your own interception facilities. Wars are much better than sending probe jets a few miles into an opponent's territory, to show you how their electronics work. One would expect that all US military communications, even trivial ones, are strongly encrypted, given the ease of doing this. Given the ease of writing strong encryption applications, I'm amazed that civilian communications are seldom -- very seldom -- encrypted. Deployment and interoperability without introducing major vulnerabilities is much harder than just designing algorithms and writing code. It involves changing peoples' habits, patterns, and practices. Remember, the cypherpunks cracked Clipper and DES, deployed the world's most widely used email encryption, secured any Web traffic that chooses to be secure, built a lot of the most popular network encryption. We beat back NSA's controlling hand, and encouraged a global spread of encryption expertise. We secured most of the Internet's control traffic (using ssh - thanks Tatu) to make it harder to break into the infrastructure. We're the A-team. But our cellphones are still trivial to track and intercept; the vast majority of email, web, and IM traffic is totally unencrypted; ordinary phone calls are totally wiretap prone; our own new technologies like 802.11 have no decent encryption and no likelihood of a real fix that works everywhere by default; we know the government IS TODAY wiretapping tons of innocents in a feeding frenzy of corruption; the US government has mandated Stasi-like wiretap capabilities in every form of new communication (even where the law gives them no power, they arrogate it and largely succeed); the wiretappers have largely built an international consensus of cops to track and wiretap anybody anywhere; practical anonymity has significantly shrunken in the last decade; and even more traffic is moving onto wireless where legal or illegal interception is undetectable. We still fight endless intra-community battles that delay or derail deployment of existing encryption. The most widespread large-scale hard-to-crack systems are being deployed AGAINST the public interest -- by the copyright mafia. If *we*, the victors in the crypto wars, couldn't get decent encryption deployed, even among ourselves, why would you expect that a government bureacracy could do it among itself and its clients? John - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
At 12:51 PM 3/31/03 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote: On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 07:38:29PM -0500, reusch wrote: | Via the Cryptome, http://www.cryptome.org/, RU sure, look | at http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news082.htm. | | I'm amazed at their claims of radio interception. One would | expect that all US military communications, even trivial ones, | are strongly encrypted, given the ease of doing this. Someone, | more well informed, please reassure me that this is the case. The ease of doing what? Applying DES with a known key? Key management is hard. Doing key lookups, cert chain management, etc, to NSA level stadards is expensive. Etc. The non-availability of good, cheap, easy to use crypto in a COTS package is the legacy of the ITAR and EAR. That there is a lack of deployed crypto in the US military should be unsuprising. Adam -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume Nosing around on the same site, one finds How military radio communications are intercepted http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news071.htm Searching for SINCGARS indicates that all US military radios have encryption capabilities, which can be turned off. Several, in use, key distribution systems are mentioned. Perhaps these systems or even encryption, with infrequently changed keys are, as you suggest, too inconvenient to use under the conditions. -MFR - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The real problem is that flaky encrypted comms are a tactical problem so it is often better to use clear comms when time is the issue. Not too helpful to know what's about to happen if you can't do anything about it anyway. -- This is a very important point! I am sure that most of what is being intercepted is tactical voice, and has very limited shelf-life. I am much more concerned about the apparent lack of good IFF (missile batteries lighting up the RAF plane that they then shot down; the USAF plane that reacted to being lit up by firing at and destroying the ground radar; stories about our close air-support firing on our tanks and other ground units)! This sounds like it is very close to criminal negligence! Do these units NOT have IFF or are they not using it or does it just not work all of the time ? Geraldo wants to know!! - chazzchezz - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 01:17:43PM -0500, Peter Wayner wrote: | He went on to talk about crypto as if it was something like fuel or | food. He said, They probably loaded up 4 or 5 days of crypto at the | beginning, but then they had to turn it off after the supply lines | got muddled. | | So this would be consistent with some key management structures but | not with others. If you give a unit a good random number source and | diffie-hellman, they should be able to go the entire war without | running out of crypto. But I don't know if the US military embraces | the kind of hierarchy-free key management imagined by cypherpunks. Heh. They certainly tend not to. And really, when you have a hierarchy, you may not even want to. The ease of jumping into an encrypted net with a MITM attack would be pretty scary, or everyone needs copies of a few dozen to thousands of authentication keys, which is going to be tricky. (Of course, if they just put the crypto on smartcards, or key fobs, you could likely carry a month or three worth of crypto with you, but then they wouldn't know what had happened to every key out there. Clearly, its better to have unencrypted comms where you know they're insecure, rather than low assurance secure comms. For some threat models that I disagree with, anyway. Adam -- It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. -Hume - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
reusch wrote: Via the Cryptome, http://www.cryptome.org/, RU sure, look at http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news082.htm. I'm amazed at their claims of radio interception. One would expect that all US military communications, even trivial ones, are strongly encrypted, given the ease of doing this. Someone, more well informed, please reassure me that this is the case. Possibly someone was bribable - presumably the CoW need to share the same frequencies and keys, so - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Remember, the cypherpunks ... secured any Web traffic Credit where it's due. Netscape was responsible for this. -Ekr -- [Eric Rescorla [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rtfm.com/ - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 02:59:11PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am much more concerned about the apparent lack of good IFF (missile batteries lighting up the RAF plane that they then shot down; the USAF plane that reacted to being lit up by firing at and destroying the ground radar; stories about our close air-support firing on our tanks and other ground units)! This sounds like it is very close to criminal negligence! Do these units NOT have IFF or are they not using it or does it just not work all of the time ? Geraldo wants to know!! - chazzchezz IFF is no longer limited to 6x8-foot Union Jacks flown by British vehicles but it's obvious there are still problems. Considering how much effort I know about in the last ten years, one would think they have every plane, vehicle, and ship tagged with something. My father fought WWII in Dallas, installing IFF in airplanes. Plenty of time to perfect these concepts. One needs to keep in mind that the problem is often simple failure to communicate. The Combat Air Patrols over the US in the last year give some insight: Fighters in Texas taking direction from Florida rather than talking to the Air Traffic Controllers below. I listen to private pilots near Dubya's ranch complaining about being attacked by F-16s while following directions from ATC. The F-16s chase scheduled airliners into Waco. Perhaps they don't have weapons and that is all that has saved planes from being shot down in Texas. -- - | 73,E-mail | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | Lyn Kennedywebpage | http://home.earthlink.net/~lrkn | | K5QWB ICBM | 32.5 North 96.9 West| ---Livin' on an information dirt road a few miles off the superhighway--- - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
At 2:10 PM -0500 3/31/03, reusch wrote: ... Nosing around on the same site, one finds How military radio communications are intercepted http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news071.htm Searching for SINCGARS indicates that all US military radios have encryption capabilities, which can be turned off. Several, in use, key distribution systems are mentioned. Perhaps these systems or even encryption, with infrequently changed keys are, as you suggest, too inconvenient to use under the conditions. -MFR There is a lot of material on SINCGARS available on line via Google. This is a low-VHF system used primarily by U.S. ground forces and those who want to talk to them. It offers both frequency hopping and Type-1 encryption (at least the newer models) and can also be used in single channel, unsecured mode to talk to older VHF-FM radios. According to one source, about 164,000 SINCGARS radios have been fielded and all older VRC-12 radios should have been replaced by 2001. The key management systems (nightmare may be a better term) are described in considerable detail in http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/sincgars.htm . It's from 1996 and makes very interesting reading. For example, radios have to have their time set to within 0.4 sec of GMT. It's easy to believe that units switch to un-encrypted modes under the stress of battle. Even tho the radios seem quite versatile, the usage is extremely hierarchical. News reports have stated that one advance in this war is that the daily tasking order can now be distributed electronically. This probably includes all the material needed to set up the SINCGARS (frequency hop list, frequency hopping keys, communications security keys, call sign lists, network IDs, etc.). That may make things a little better than in 1996. I went to a lecture at MIT by someone for the US Army talking about the soldier of the future, an integrated body armor/backpack/electronics system. I asked about encryption and he said it was Army doctrine not to use it at the intra-squad level. Key management is one of the issues. That is consistent with the number of SINCGARs radios produced. So there should be plenty of open voice traffic to analyze. Arnold Reinhold - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
Eric Rescorla wrote: Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 23:42 To: John Gilmore Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications? John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Remember, the cypherpunks ... secured any Web traffic Credit where it's due. Netscape was responsible for this. Just for the record, SSLv1 first saw significant review, if it was not first posted to, the Cypherpunks mailing list. Those who participated in the list at the time may remember Mark Andreessen, a Cypherpunks newbie in those days, proudly posting his new crypto protocol. The protocol received the customary reception security protocols designed by crypto newbies tend to receive: it was torn to shreds immediately. SSLv2 rapidly superceded SSLv1. SSLv2 in turn was implemented throughout Netscape's products by the Weinstein brothers, which during those days were very active participants in both the Cypherpunks mailing list and Cypherpunks meetings. --Lucky Green - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?
Well I am sure most of you would be amazed and/or flabbergasted with how the crypto keys are handed out for the different avionics/communication devices on a daily basis. You will know if you forgot one of them like when you pass over a hawk missile sight at the edge of base, and they lock on and start tracking you. Notice I said daily basis. Might give a hint to how they ran out. Dave _ Dave Kleiman [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.netmedic.net -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Wayner Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 13:18 To: reusch; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Russia Intercepts US Military Communications? At 7:38 PM -0500 3/30/03, reusch wrote: Via the Cryptome, http://www.cryptome.org/, RU sure, look at http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news082.htm. I showed this link to a friend who fixes helicopters for the Army/Marines. He was incredulous at first, but then said, Oh, they probably just turned off the crypto. There's a switch to do that. Sometimes you have to do that if things screw up. He went on to talk about crypto as if it was something like fuel or food. He said, They probably loaded up 4 or 5 days of crypto at the beginning, but then they had to turn it off after the supply lines got muddled. So this would be consistent with some key management structures but not with others. If you give a unit a good random number source and diffie-hellman, they should be able to go the entire war without running out of crypto. But I don't know if the US military embraces the kind of hierarchy-free key management imagined by cypherpunks. Of course, many of the details from the Russian could be gathered from raw traffic analysis. It's easy to count messages and triangulate to figure out where US troops are massing. It's also easy to tell that an absence of messages from the interior of the city means that the US troops haven't entered yet. The crypto may cloak the details of the messages, but those details may not be too important. (I wouldn't be surprised if they carried some news of the NCAA basketball tournament, for instance.) -Peter - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED] - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
