A consumer advocacy group is suing Zoom and seeking millions of dollars in damages, accusing the company of misleading its users about the strength of its encryption protections. From a report: The nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog is also accusing the videoconferencing company of deceiving users about the extent of its links with China and the fact that some calls between people in North America were routed through servers in China. That raises the danger Beijing could steal or demand access to the contents of those calls, according to a copy of the lawsuit, which was shared exclusively with The Cybersecurity 202.

Those phony claims "lull[ed] consumers and businesses into a false sense of security" and helped Zoom to soar in popularity during the early months of the pandemic, according the lawsuit, which was filed late yesterday in Washington D.C. Superior Court. The consumer group fears that if Zoom isn't punished, other companies will be incentivized to make false claims about their security and privacy protections to attract users and stand out against competitors.

"As controversy rages over the governance of Google's Istio service mesh, Microsoft has seen an opportunity to offer a simple and truly open alternative," reports InfoWorld: Microsoft has announced that it will release its own open source service mesh — called Open Service Mesh (OSM) — and transfer it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as soon as possible. This sets the Redmond-based company apart from its cloud rival Google, which recently announced that its own Istio service mesh will no longer be part of the vendor-neutral CNCF and will instead sit under Google's own Open Usage Commons foundation.

The service mesh has quickly become a vital part of the modern cloud native computing stack, as it essentially enables communication, monitoring, and load balancing between disparate parts of today's microservices-based architecture. This differs from the popular container orchestration service Kubernetes in its level of granularity. When run in tandem with Kubernetes, a service mesh enables deeper security policy and encryption enforcement and automated load balancing and circuit breaking functionality...

With this launch Microsoft is not only aligning itself with the open governance side of the debate which has been raging through the open source software community for the past few months, but is also looking to solve a customer pain point.

China's Great Firewall "is now blocking HTTPS connections set up via the new TLS 1.3 encryption protocol and which use ESNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication)," reports ZDNet: The block has been in place for more than a week, according to a joint report authored by three organizations tracking Chinese censorship — iYouPort, the University of Maryland, and the Great Firewall Report. ZDNet also confirmed the report's findings with two additional sources — namely members of a U.S. telecommunications provider and an internet exchange point (IXP) — using instructions provided in a mailing list...

The reason for the ban is obvious for experts. HTTPS connections negotiated via TLS 1.3 and ESNI prevent third-party observers from detecting what website a user is attempting to access. This effectively blinds the Chinese government's Great Firewall surveillance tool from seeing what users are doing online.

There is a myth surrounding HTTPS connections that network observers (such as internet service providers) cannot see what users are doing. This is technically incorrect. While HTTPS connections are encrypted and prevent network observers from viewing/reading the contents of an HTTPS connection, there is a short period before HTTPS connections are established when third-parties can detect to what server the user is connecting. This is done by looking at the HTTPS connection's SNI (Server Name Indication) field.

In HTTPS connections negotiated via older versions of the TLS protocol (such as TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2), the SNI field is visible in plaintext.

Bill Gates gave a wide-ranging new interview to Wired's Steven Levy (also republished at Ars Technica.) The interview's first question: as a man who'd been warning about a pandemic for years, are you disappointed with the response of the United States? Bill Gates: Yeah. There's three time periods, all of which have disappointments. There is 2015 until this particular pandemic hit. If we had built up the diagnostic, therapeutic, and vaccine platforms, and if we'd done the simulations to understand what the key steps were, we'd be dramatically better off. Then there's the time period of the first few months of the pandemic, when the U.S. actually made it harder for the commercial testing companies to get their tests approved, the CDC had this very low volume test that didn't work at first, and they weren't letting people test. The travel ban came too late, and it was too narrow to do anything. Then, after the first few months, eventually we figured out about masks, and that leadership is important... [America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] have basically been muzzled since the beginning. We called the CDC, but they told us we had to talk to the White House a bunch of times. Now they say, "Look, we're doing a great job on testing, we don't want to talk to you." Even the simplest things, which would greatly improve this system, they feel would be admitting there is some imperfection and so they are not interested.

Wired: Do you think it's the agencies that fell down or just the leadership at the top, the White House?

Bill Gates: We can do the postmortem at some point. We still have a pandemic going on, and we should focus on that....

Wired: At this point, are you optimistic?

Bill Gates: Yes. You have to admit there's been trillions of dollars of economic damage done and a lot of debts, but the innovation pipeline on scaling up diagnostics, on new therapeutics, on vaccines is actually quite impressive. And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022. That is only because of the scale of the innovation that's taking place...

This disease, from both the animal data and the phase 1 data, seems to be very vaccine preventable.
Gates also believes the government shouldn't allow encryption to hide "lies or fraud or child pornography" on apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp -- prompting the interviewer to ask whether he's talked to his friend Mark Zuckerberg about it. "After I said this publicly, he sent me mail. I like Mark, I think he's got very good values, but he and I do disagree on the trade-offs involved there..."

Gates also thought today's tech executives got off easy with five hours of testifying before a Congressional subcommittee as a group of four. "Jesus Christ, what's the Congress coming to? If you want to give a guy a hard time, give him at least a whole day that he has to sit there on the hot seat by himself! And they didn't even have to get on a plane...!"

Gates added later that "there are a lot of valid issues, and if you're super-successful, the pleasure of going in front of the Congress comes with the territory."

Garmin has reportedly paid a ransom to receive a decryption key to recover its files, after they were hit by the WastedLocker Ransomware last month. Digital Trends reports: [BleepingComputer] found that the attackers used the WastedLocker Ransomware and reported that they demanded $10 million as a ransom. Now, it also uncovered that Garmin is using a decryption key to regain access to its files, suggesting that the company may have paid that ransom demand or some other amount. The WastedLocker software uses encryption which has no known weaknesses, so the assumption is that to break it, the company must have paid the attackers for the decryption key. [...] The company reassured customers that no customer data was stolen, and that no payment information from the Garmin Pay payment system was accessed or stolen either.

On Twitter, the company announced last week, "We are happy to report that many of the systems and services affected by the recent outage, including Garmin Connect, are returning to operation. Some features still have temporary limitations while all of the data is being processed."

"In a new paper, Cornell Tech researchers identified a problem that holds the key to whether all encryption can be broken — as well as a surprising connection to a mathematical concept that aims to define and measure randomness," according to a news release shared by Slashdot reader bd580slashdot: "Our result not only shows that cryptography has a natural 'mother' problem, it also shows a deep connection between two quite separate areas of mathematics and computer science — cryptography and algorithmic information theory," said Rafael Pass, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech...

Researchers have not been able to prove the existence of a one-way function. The most well-known candidate — which is also the basis of the most commonly used encryption schemes on the internet — relies on integer factorization. It's easy to multiply two random prime numbers — for instance, 23 and 47 — but significantly harder to find those two factors if only given their product, 1,081. It is believed that no efficient factoring algorithm exists for large numbers, Pass said, though researchers may not have found the right algorithms yet.

"The central question we're addressing is: Does it exist? Is there some natural problem that characterizes the existence of one-way functions?" he said. "If it does, that's the mother of all problems, and if you have a way to solve that problem, you can break all purported one-way functions. And if you don't know how to solve that problem, you can actually get secure cryptography...."

In the paper, Pass and doctoral student Yanyi Liu showed that if computing time-bounded Kolmogorov Complexity is hard, then one-way functions exist. Although their finding is theoretical, it has potential implications across cryptography, including internet security.

A recent series of malware attacks on U.S.-based merchants suggest thieves are exploiting weaknesses in how certain financial institutions have implemented the technology in chip-based credit and debit cards to sidestep key security features and effectively create usable, counterfeit cards. Brian Krebs reports via Krebs on Security: Traditional payment cards encode cardholder account data in plain text on a magnetic stripe, which can be read and recorded by skimming devices or malicious software surreptitiously installed in payment terminals. That data can then be encoded onto anything else with a magnetic stripe and used to place fraudulent transactions. Newer, chip-based cards employ a technology known as EMV that encrypts the account data stored in the chip. The technology causes a unique encryption key -- referred to as a token or "cryptogram" -- to be generated each time the chip card interacts with a chip-capable payment terminal.

Virtually all chip-based cards still have much of the same data that's stored in the chip encoded on a magnetic stripe on the back of the card. This is largely for reasons of backward compatibility since many merchants -- particularly those in the United States -- still have not fully implemented chip card readers. This dual functionality also allows cardholders to swipe the stripe if for some reason the card's chip or a merchant's EMV-enabled terminal has malfunctioned. But there are important differences between the cardholder data stored on EMV chips versus magnetic stripes. One of those is a component in the chip known as an integrated circuit card verification value or "iCVV" for short -- also known as a "dynamic CVV." The iCVV differs from the card verification value (CVV) stored on the physical magnetic stripe, and protects against the copying of magnetic-stripe data from the chip and the use of that data to create counterfeit magnetic stripe cards. Both the iCVV and CVV values are unrelated to the three-digit security code that is visibly printed on the back of a card, which is used mainly for e-commerce transactions or for card verification over the phone. The appeal of the EMV approach is that even if a skimmer or malware manages to intercept the transaction information when a chip card is dipped, the data is only valid for that one transaction and should not allow thieves to conduct fraudulent payments with it going forward.

However, for EMV's security protections to work, the back-end systems deployed by card-issuing financial institutions are supposed to check that when a chip card is dipped into a chip reader, only the iCVV is presented; and conversely, that only the CVV is presented when the card is swiped. If somehow these do not align for a given transaction type, the financial institution is supposed to decline the transaction. More recently, researchers at Cyber R&D Labs published a paper detailing how they tested 11 chip card implementations from 10 different banks in Europe and the U.S. The researchers found they could harvest data from four of them and create cloned magnetic stripe cards that were successfully used to place transactions. There are now strong indications the same method detailed by Cyber R&D Labs is being used by point-of-sale (POS) malware to capture EMV transaction data that can then be resold and used to fabricate magnetic stripe copies of chip-based cards.

MojoKid writes: Today AMD took the wraps off a new line of desktop processors based on its Zen 2 architecture but also with integrated Radeon graphics to better compete against Intel with OEM system builders. These new AMD Ryzen 4000 socket AM4 desktop processors are essentially juiced-up versions of AMD's already announced Ryzen 4000 laptop CPUs, but with faster base and boost clocks, as well as faster GPU clocks for desktop PCs. There are two distinct families AMD Ryzen 4000 families, a trio of 65-watt processors that include the Ryzen 3 4300G (4-core/8-thread), Ryzen 5 4600G (6-core/12-thread), and the flagship Ryzen 7 4700G, offering 8 cores/16 threads, base/boost clocks of 3.6GHz/4.4GHz, 12MB cache, and 8 Radeon Vega cores clocked at 2100MHz. AMD is also offering three 35-watt processors -- Ryzen 3 4300GE, Ryzen 5 4600GE, and the Ryzen 7 4700GE -- which share the same base hardware configurations as the "G" models but slightly lower CPU/GPU clocks to reduce power consumption. In addition AMD also announced its Ryzen Pro 4000 series for business desktops, which also include a dedicated security processor and support for AMD Memory Guard full system memory encryption. As you might expect, specs (core/cache counts, CPU/GPU clocks) for the Ryzen Pro 4000G (65W) and Ryzen Pro 4000GE (35W) largely line up with their consumer desktop counterparts.

An anonymous reader writes: A rare 1944 four-rotor M4 Enigma cipher machine, considered one of the hardest challenges for the Allies to decrypt, has sold at a Christie's auction for $437,955. As noted by Christie's, the M4 Enigma has a special place in computing history as the Allied efforts to break its encryption led to the development of the first programmable computer, the one developed at Bletchley Park that was used to secretly break the M4, giving Allied forces visibility into German naval planning during the Battle of the Atlantic until its surrender in mid-1945.

The M4 Enigmas are considered rare because they were made in smaller numbers than three-rotor machines. After Germany capitulated, the country ordered troops to destroy remaining Enigmas in order to keep them from Allied forces. After the war Winston Churchill also ordered all remaining Enigmas destroyed to help preserve the secret of Allied decoding successes at Bletchley. The M4 Enigmas were made on the order of Admiral Karl Donitz, the commander of the German U-boat fleet, who had concerns over repeated Allied successes against his submarines. The M4 became available to the U-boat fleet in May 1941, preventing Allies from knowing where German's U-boats were positioned for almost a year until Turing and Joe Desch in Dayton, Ohio developed the computer that broke M4 encryption to decipher German messages. By mid-1943 the majority of M4 Enigma messages were being read by the Allies, but it was not until the 1970s that knowledge of the Allied successes against the Enigma was made public. "Rival auction house Sotheby's sold an M4 Enigma last year for $800,000, which may have reached a higher selling price because it was one of one of 15 Enigma machines found in a bunker at Germany's key Northern European naval base in Trondheim, Norway, which Germany had occupied since 1940," adds ZDNet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 84 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome 84 resumes SameSite cookie changes, includes the Web OTP API and Web Animations API, and removes older Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions. First deprecated with Chrome 81 in April, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 have now been completely removed with Chrome 84. This is notable for anyone who manages a website, even if they don't use Chrome at home or at work. TLS is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network -- websites use it to secure all communications between their servers and browsers. TLS also succeeds Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and thus handles the encryption of every HTTPS connection.

In May 2016, Chrome 51 introduced the SameSite attribute to allow sites to declare whether cookies should be restricted to a same-site (first-party) context. The hope was this would mitigate cross-site request forgeries (CSRF). Chrome 80 began enforcing a new secure-by-default cookie classification system, treating cookies that have no declared SameSite value as SameSite=Lax cookies. Only cookies set as SameSite=None; Secure are available in third-party contexts, provided they are being accessed from secure connections. Due to the coronavirus crisis, however, Google paused the SameSite cookie changes, with plans to resume enforcement sometime over the summer. SameSite cookie enforcement has now resumed with a gradual rollout ramping up over the next several weeks for Chrome 80 and newer.

Chrome 84 introduces the Web OTP API (formerly called the SMS Receiver API). This API helps users enter a one-time password (OTP) on a webpage when a specially crafted SMS message is delivered to their Android phone. When verifying the ownership of a phone number, developers typically send an OTP over SMS that must be manually entered by the user (or copied and pasted). The user has to switch to their native SMS app and back to their web app to input the code. The Web OTP API lets developers help users enter the code with one tap. Chrome 84 also adopts the Web Animations API, which gives developers more control over web animations. These can be used to help users navigate a digital space, remember your app or site, and provide implicit hints around how to use your product. Parts of the API have been around for some time, but this implementation brings greater spec compliance and supports compositing operations, which control how effects are combined and offer many new hooks that enable replaceable events. The API also supports Promises, which allow for animation sequencing and provide greater control over how animations interact with other app features.

Cambridge Engineering alumnus Hal Evans has built a fully-functioning replica of a 1930s Polish cyclometer -- an electromechanical cryptologic device that was designed to assist in the decryption of German Enigma ciphertext. The replica currently resides in King's College, Cambridge. TechXplore reports: Work on the hardware-based replica began in 2018, as part of Hal's fourth year Master's project under the supervision of King's College Fellow and Senior Tutor Dr. Tim Flack. The aim was to investigate further into cryptologist Marian Rejewski's cyclometer -- an early forerunner to Cambridge University mathematician Alan Turing's machine, known as the Bombe, which was used to crack the German Enigma code during the Second World War. Hal said he chose to work on the cyclometer as it was the very first machine used to assist the decryption effort. To his knowledge, the replica is the first fully-functioning hardware-based electromechanical cyclometer to exist since the years preceding the Second World War. The original machines would have been destroyed in 1939 to prevent them from falling into the hands of German invaders.

Rejewski's cyclometer exploited the German's procedure at the time of double encipherment of the Enigma message key, and semi-automated the process for calculating what were known as 'characteristics' for every possible Enigma rotor starting position. There were more than 100,000 of these rotor starting positions, and they each needed their characteristic to be calculated and catalogued in a card index system. The cyclometer therefore eliminated the arduous task of calculating these characteristics by hand. The machine consisted of, in effect, two interlinked Enigma systems side-by-side -- one offset by three positions relative to the other -- and 26 lamps and switches to cover the alphabet. On operation, a certain number of bulbs illuminated, indicating the lengths of the characteristics. These were recorded for every single possible rotor starting position to create an immense look-up catalogue. Once this was completed, obtaining the daily Enigma rotor starting settings to decode messages was a simple matter of intercepting enough messages and referencing the catalogue, taking only a matter of minutes.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for Vice: Ever since NSA leaker Edward Snowden said "use Signal, use Tor," the end-to-end encrypted chat app has been a favorite of people who care about privacy and need a chat and calling app that is hard to spy on. One of the reasons security experts recommended Signal is because the app's developers collected -- and thus retained -- almost no information about its users. This means that, if subpoenaed by law enforcement, Signal would have essentially nothing to turn over. Signal demonstrated this in 2016, when it was subpoenaed by a court in Virginia. But a newly added feature that allows users to recover certain data, such as contacts, profile information, settings, and blocked users, has led some high-profile security experts to criticize the app's developers and threaten to stop using it.

Signal will store that data on servers the company owns, protected by a PIN that the app has initially been asking users to add, and then forced them to. The purpose of using a PIN is, in the near future, to allow Signal users to be identified by a username, as opposed to their phone number, as Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike explained on Twitter (as we've written before, this is a laudable goal; tying Signal to a phone number has its own privacy and security implications). But this also means that unlike in the past, Signal now retains certain user data, something that many cybersecurity and cryptography experts see as too dangerous. Matthew Green, a cryptographer and computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, said that this was "the wrong decision," and that forcing users to create a PIN and use this feature would force him to stop using the app.

Andy Greenberg writes via Wired: Late last week, government agencies, including the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team and Cyber Command, sounded the alarm about a particularly nasty vulnerability in a line of BIG-IP products sold by F5. The agencies recommended security professionals immediately implement a patch to protect the devices from hacking techniques that could fully take control of the networking equipment, offering access to all the traffic they touch and a foothold for deeper exploitation of any corporate network that uses them. Now some security companies say they're already seeing the F5 vulnerability being exploited in the wildâ"and they caution that any organization that didn't patch its F5 equipment over the weekend is already too late.

The F5 vulnerability, first discovered and disclosed to F5 by cybersecurity firm Positive Technologies, affects a series of so-called BIG-IP devices that act as load balancers within large enterprise networks, distributing traffic to different servers that host applications or websites. Positive Technologies found a so-called directory traversal bug in the web-based management interface for those BIG-IP devices, allowing anyone who can connect to them to access information they're not intended to. That vulnerability was exacerbated by another bug that allows an attacker to run a "shell" on the devices that essentially lets a hacker run any code on them that they choose. The result is that anyone who can find an internet-exposed, unpatched BIG-IP device can intercept and mess with any of the traffic it touches. Hackers could, for instance, intercept and redirect transactions made through a bank's website, or steal users' credentials. They could also use the hacked device as a hop point to try to compromise other devices on the network. Since BIG-IP devices have the ability to decrypt traffic bound for web servers, an attacker could even use the bug to steal the encryption keys that guarantee the security of an organization's HTTPS traffic with users, warns Kevin Gennuso, a cybersecurity practitioner for a major American retailer. While only a small minority of F5 BIG-IP devices are directly exploitable, Positive Technologies says that still includes 8,000 devices worldwide. "About 40 percent of those are in the U.S., along with 16 percent in China and single-digit percentages in other countries around the globe," reports Wired.

"Owners of those devices have had since June 30, when F5 first revealed the bug along with its patch, to update," adds Wired. "But many may not have immediately realized the seriousness of the vulnerability. Others may have been hesitant to take their load balancing equipment offline to implement an untested patch, points out Gennuso, for fear that critical services might go down, which would further delay a fix."

"A security researcher was able to access files on a Axon body-worn camera he purchased from eBay that had video files of Fort Huachuca Military Police officers conducting investigations and filling out paperwork," reports the Arizona Mirror: The files were able to be extracted after the researcher, who goes by KF on Twitter, was able to remove a microSD card from the body-worn camera. KF was then able to extract the un-encrypted files, which were not protected by a password, using a tool called Foremost. KF shared screenshots of the footage he was able to pull from the cards that appeared to show members of the Fort Huachuca Military Police entering a person's home and filling out paperwork.

"We are aware of this issue and have launched an investigation looking into the matter," a statement from Scottsdale-based Axon said to Arizona Mirror. "We are also reevaluating our processes to better emphasize proper disposal procedures for our customers."

The camera that was purchased by KF was an Axon Body 1, one of the company's earliest generation models that launched in 2013. The company said it stopped the model in 2015. "Our latest generation camera, Axon Body 3, offers enhanced security measures such as storage encryption to protect video from being retrieved from lost or improperly disposed cameras," the statement said.
Friday the original security researcher posted an update on Twitter, saying he'd offered to send the body cam's SD card back to the military police -- an offer that was eventually accepted by Axon itself -- and "I only listened to a few seconds of audio merely to verify its presence. I've since removed all extracted data in full."

In an earlier tweet he'd added, "Those of you asking... NO, I won't dump the card for you. Procure your own BWC (Body Worn Cam), and dump it yourself " But it looks like they already are. Earlier on Twitter, one Security Operations Center analyst posted, "I just ordered two myself.

"I'd actually really like to get a fund going to buy literally all of them and dump them to an open cloud storage bucket... Freedom of Information Act through the secondhand market."

Long-time Slashdot reader stikves reminded us that a committee in the U.S. Senate passed an amended version of the "EARN IT" act on Thursday. And this new version could do more than just end personal end-to-end encryption, warns Engadget: The other major concern opponents of the EARN IT Act raise has to do with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that companies are not liable for much of the content that users post. Originally, the EARN IT Act proposed requiring that companies "earn" Section 230 protections by following recommended practices outlined by a Department of Justice commission. Without those protections, companies like Twitter or Facebook might be compelled to remove anything that might prompt a legal challenge, which could threaten freedom of speech. The amendments passed Thursday strip the Department of Justice commission of any legal authority and will not require companies to earn Section 230 protections by following recommended practices.

But the amended bill would change Section 230 to allow lawsuits from states, and state legislatures could restrict or outlaw encryption technologies.
The senior policy counsel for Free Press Action, a media reform advocacy group, harshly criticized the legislation's new version.

"Even as amended today, it invites states to begin passing all sorts of laws under the guise of protecting against abuse, but replicating the problems with the original EARN IT Act's text."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: [The Open Technology Fund is a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, which is part of the umbrella group called the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which also controls Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.] OTF's goal is to help oppressed communities across the globe by building the digital tools they need and offering training and support to use those tools. Its work has saved countless lives, and every single day millions of people use OTF-assisted tools to communicate and speak out without fear of arrest, retribution, or even death. The fund has helped dissidents raise their voices beyond China's advanced censorship network, known as the Great Firewall; helped citizens in Cuba to access news from sources other than the state-sanctioned media; and supported independent journalists in Russia so they could work without fear of a backlash from the Kremlin. Closer to home, the tools that OTF has funded, including the encrypted messaging app Signal, have allowed Black Lives Matter protesters to organize demonstrations across the country more securely.

But now all of that is under threat, after Michael Pack, a Trump appointee and close ally of Steve Bannon, took control of USAGM in June. Pack has ousted the OTF's leadership, removed its bipartisan board, and replaced it with Trump loyalists, including Bethany Kozma, an anti-transgender activist. One reason the OTF managed to gain the trust of technologists and activists around the world is because, as its name suggests, it invested largely in open-source technology. By definition, open-source software's source code is publicly available, meaning it can be studied, vetted, and in many cases contributed to by anyone in the world. This transparency makes it possible for experts to study code to see if it has, for example, backdoors or vulnerabilities that would allow for governments to compromise the software's security, potentially putting users at risk of being surveilled or identified. Now, groups linked to Pack and Bannon have been pressing for the funding of closed-source technology, which is antithetical to the OTF's work over the last eight years. Pack is being pressed to fund Freegate and Ultrasurf, "two little-known apps that allow users to circumvent internet censorship in repressive regimes but currently have very small user bases inside China," reports Vice. "These apps are not widely trusted by internet freedom experts and activists, according to six experts who spoke to VICE News. That the OTF would pivot its funding from trusted, open-source tech to more obscure, closed-source tech has alarmed activists around the world and has resulted in open revolt among OTF's former leadership."

More than half a dozen experts who spoke to VICE News "said the apps' code is out of date, dangerously vulnerable to compromise, and lacks the user base to allow it to effectively scale even if they secured government funding."

The iPhone that Moroccan journalist Omar Radi used to contact his sources also allowed his government to spy on him (and at least two other journalists), reports the Toronto Star, citing new research from Amnesty International.

A Slashdot reader shares their report: Their government could read every email, text and website visited; listen to every phone call and watch every video conference; download calendar entries, monitor GPS coordinates, and even turn on the camera and microphone to see and hear where the phone was at any moment.

Yet Radi was trained in encryption and cyber security. He hadn't clicked on any suspicious links and didn't have any missed calls on WhatsApp — both well-documented ways a cell phone can be hacked. Instead, a report published Monday by Amnesty International shows Radi was targeted by a new and frighteningly stealthy technique. All he had to do was visit one website. Any website.

Forensic evidence gathered by Amnesty International on Radi's phone shows that it was infected by "network injection," a fully automated method where an attacker intercepts a cellular signal when it makes a request to visit a website. In milliseconds, the web browser is diverted to a malicious site and spyware code is downloaded that allows remote access to everything on the phone. The browser then redirects to the intended website and the user is none the wiser.
Two more human rights advocates in Morocco have been targeted by the same malware, the article reports.

In response to the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act proposed by three Republican senators, Big Tech companies have registered their opposition through their Reform Government Surveillance coalition. From a report: They said that building encryption backdoors would jeopardize the sensitive data of billions of users and "leave all Americans, businesses, and government agencies dangerously exposed to cyber threats from criminals and foreign adversaries." They also pointed out that as the pandemic has forced everyone to rely on the internet "in critical ways," digital security is paramount and strong encryption is the way forward. The coalition's members are Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snap, Verizon Media, Dropbox, and Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. The coalition was established in December 2013, a few months after documents about the United States' PRISM data collection program were leaked.

Comcast has joined Cloudflare and NextDNS in partnering with Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program, which aims to make DNS more trusted and secure. Neowin reports: Commenting on the move, Firefox CTO Eric Rescorla, said: "Comcast has moved quickly to adopt DNS encryption technology and we're excited to have them join the TRR program. Bringing ISPs into the TRR program helps us protect user privacy online without disrupting existing user experiences. We hope this sets a precedent for further cooperation between browsers and ISPs."

With its TRR program, Mozilla said that encrypting DNS data with DoH is just the first step in securing DNS. It said that the second step requires companies handling the data to have appropriate rules in place for handling it. Mozilla believes these rules include limiting data collection and retention, ensuring transparency about any retained data, and limiting the use of the resolver to block access or modify content. Ars Technica notes that joining Mozilla's program means that Comcast agreed that it won't "retain, sell, or transfer to any third party (except as may be required by law) any personal information, IP addresses, or other user identifiers, or user query patterns from the DNS queries sent from the Firefox browser," along with other requirements.

When the change happens, it'll be automatic for users unless they've chosen a different DoH provider or disabled DoH altogether. Comcast told Ars yesterday that "Firefox users on Xfinity should automatically default to Xfinity resolvers under Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program, unless they have manually chosen a different resolver, or if DoH is disabled. The precise mechanism is still being tested and the companies plan to document it soon in an IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] Draft."

New submitter feross shares a report: A group of Senate Republicans is looking to force tech companies to comply with "lawful access" to encrypted information, potentially jeopardizing the technology's security features. On Tuesday, Republican lawmakers introduced the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act, which calls for an end to "warrant-proof" encryption that's disrupted criminal investigations. The bill was proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, along with Sens. Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn. If passed, the act would require tech companies to help investigators access encrypted data if that assistance would help carry out a warrant. Lawmakers and the US Justice Department have long battled with tech companies over encryption, which is used to encode data.

The Justice Department argues that encryption prevents investigators from getting necessary evidence from suspects' devices and has requested that tech giants provide "lawful access." That could come in many ways, such as providing a key to unlock encryption that's only available for police requests. The FBI made a similar request to Apple in 2016 when it wanted to get data from a dead terrorist's iPhone in a San Bernardino, California, shooting case. Giving access specifically to government agencies when requested is often referred to as an "encryption backdoor," something tech experts and privacy advocates have long argued endangers more people than it helps.