Encryption technology: a new weapon for terrorists.

(Baonghean.vn) - Many officials in the Obama administration have confirmed that the Islamic State (IS) has used a range of encryption technologies for over a year. Some of the best technologies are free, easily accessible applications such as Signal, Wickr, and Telegram, which encrypt messages from mobile phones.

These officials implicitly suggested that other encryption technologies are not as secure as terrorist and criminal groups think, and clearly they don't want them to guess which technologies are within the NSA's "penetration" capabilities.

Caption: IS's channel on Telegram – one of the terrorist organization's "favorite" encrypted messaging apps. Photo: Internet

Two weeks ago, ISIS militants used Telegram to claim responsibility for shooting down a Russian plane in the Sinai Peninsula, killing 224 people. They used the app again last week to claim responsibility for the Paris massacre, in Arabic, English, and French.

It is unclear whether they used Telegram's secure messaging service to encrypt private conversations. It's possible the Paris attackers met in person to plan the attacks, especially since some of them lived in the same area of ​​Brussels, Belgium. But if a command center existed in Syria or elsewhere, some form of communication would have been necessary.

ISIS used Telegram to issue statements claiming responsibility for the attacks. Photo: Internet

The recent attack has reignited bitter debates between US intelligence and Silicon Valley about end-to-end encryption technology. Just a week ago, the issue seemed to have been temporarily resolved, when President Obama stated that forcing tech companies to provide decryption keys for protected conversations and data was ineffective.

Apple has now made encryption a standard part of its iMessage messaging service. Apple CEO Timothy D. Cook is adamant about defending the technology, which holds the decryption key for messages held by the users at both ends of the conversation.

Cook argued with Obama that only by doing so could customers be assured that the most important data they stored on their phones could not be accessed by cybercriminals or other countries through hacking or court orders.

Cook argued that investigators have many ways to gather crucial clues from "metadata" about phone users, from information on the internet cloud, or by hacking into the target's device.

However, the speed of the encryption wave has raised alarm bells among law enforcement and intelligence officials. British Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to ban such technologies late last year, but later reversed his intention.

Michael Morell, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said: "I think this will open up a whole new debate about security and privacy."

Speaking to CBS last weekend, he said, "We've had a public debate about Edward Snowden," the former NSA employee who revealed information about the agency's efforts to crack encryption. Morell suggested that a new debate would "break out because of what happened in Paris."

Shortly before the events in Paris, Belgian authorities confirmed that ISIS terrorists were concealing their communications through the use of online gaming tools such as Sony's PlayStation 4.

Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon stated publicly last week: "It's even harder to keep track of the PlayStation 4 than WhatsApp," a popular messaging system owned by Facebook.

The terrorists in Paris are believed to have exchanged information via Sony's PlayStation Network. Photo: Internet

Security experts argue that even user-to-user encryption technology misses much of the data needed to determine who is chatting with whom, where, and when. Matt Blaze, a computer security expert at the University of Pennsylvania, asserts:

"Encryption is indeed effective at making it difficult to access the content of information exchange, but it is not effective at concealing the existence of information exchange."

"All encryption technologies in the world are useless if the endpoint holding the decryption key is attacked. Therefore, it is necessary to take note of the idea that encryption makes terrorist communications completely secret."

Even if Apple and other US companies are forced to weaken the encryption in their services, US authorities still have no legal jurisdiction over Telegram, the German messaging service that ISIS recently used to disseminate its messages.

Thu Giang

(According to the NY Times)