So the gloves are starting to come off: Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith wrote a long blog post this morning discussing how Microsoft plans to protect its customers’ data from unlawful interception by “unauthorized government access”. He never specifically mentions NSA, GCHQ, et al, but clearly the Five Eyes partners are who he’s talking about. Many other news outlets have dissected Smith’s post in detail, so I wanted to focus on a couple of lesser-known aspects.
First is that Microsoft is promising to use perfect forward secrecy (PFS) when it encrypts communications links. Most link-encryption protocols, including IPsec and SSL, use a key exchange algorithm known as Diffie-Hellman to allow the two endpoints can agree on a temporary session key by using their longer-term private/public key pairs. The session key is usually be renegotiated for each conversation. If Eve the eavesdropper or Mallet the man-in-the-middle intercept the communications, they may be able to decrypt it if they can guess or obtain the session key. Without PFS, an attacker who can intercept and record a communication stream now and can guess or obtain the private key of either endpoint can decrypt the stream. Think of this like finding a message in a bottle written in an unknown language, then next year seeing Rosetta Stone begin to offer a course in the language. PFS protects an encrypted communication stream now from future attack by changing the way the session keys are generated and shared. Twitter, Google, and a number of other cloud companies have already deployed PFS (Google, in fact, started in 2011) so it is great to see Microsoft joining in this trend. (A topic for another day: under what conditions can on-premises Exchange and Lync use PFS? Paging Mark Smith…)
Second is that Microsoft is acknowledging that they use data-at-rest encryption, and will be using it more often. Probably more than any other vendor, Microsoft is responsible for democratizing disk encryption by including BitLocker in Windows Vista and its successors, then steadily improving it. (Yes, I know that TrueCrypt and PGP predated BitLocker, but their installed bases are tiny by comparison.) Back in 2011 I wrote about some of the tradeoffs in using BitLocker with Exchange, and I suspected that Microsoft was using BitLocker in their Office 365 data centers, a suspicion that was confirmed recently during a presentation by some of the Office 365 engineering team and, now, by Smith’s post. Having said that, data-at-rest encryption isn’t that wonderful in the context of Office 365 because the risk of an attacker (or even an insider) stealing data by stealing/copying physical disks from an Office 365 data center is already low. There are many layers of physical and procedural security that help keep this risk low, so encrypting the stored data on disk is of relatively low value compared to encrypting the links over which that data travels.
The third aspect is actually something that’s missing from Smith’s post, expressed as one word: Skype. Outlook.com, Office 365, SkyDrive, and Azure are all mentioned specifically as targets for improved encryption, but nothing about Skype? That seems like a telling omission, especially given Microsoft’s lack of prior transparency about interception of Skype communications. Given the PR benefits that the company undoubtedly expects from announcing how they’re going to strengthen security, the fact that Smith was silent on Skype indicates, at least to suspicious folks like me, that for now they aren’t making any changes. Perhaps the newly-announced transparency centers will provide neutral third parties an opportunity to inspect the Skype source code to verify its integrity.
Finally, keep in mind that nothing discussed in Smith’s post addresses targeted operations where the attacker (or government agency, take your pick) mounts man-in-the-middle attacks (QUANTUM/FOXACID) or infiltrates malware onto a specific target’s computer. That’s not necessarily a problem that Microsoft can solve on its own.
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