The Athens Affair

Prevelakis, Vassilis; Spinellis, Diomidis

doi:10.1109/mspec.2007.376605

Cited by 79 publications

(32 citation statements)

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“…For ten months in 2004 and 2005, 100 senior members of the Greek government (including the Prime Minister, the head of the Ministry of National Defense and the head of the Ministry of Justice) were wiretapped by unknown parties through lawful access built into a telephone switch owned by Vodafone Greece [19]. In 2010 an IBM researcher observed that a Cisco architecture for enabling lawful interception in IP networks was insecure.…”

Section: What Has Changed and What Remains The Same Since 1990s?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Keys under doormats

et al. 2015

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Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement channels "going dark," these attempts to regulate the emerging Internet were abandoned. In the intervening years, innovation on the Internet flourished, and law enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger quantities of data. Today we are again hearing calls for regulation to mandate the provision of exceptional access mechanisms. In this report, a group of computer scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary access mandates.We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today's Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse "forward secrecy" design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today's Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.

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Section: What Has Changed and What Remains The Same Since 1990s?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Keys under doormats

et al. 2015

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“…Regarding to actual cases of LI misuse, probably the most well-known one is the Vodafone Greece case (Prevelakis and Spinellis, 2007) in2004e2005, where some unknown attackers leveraged the wiretap capabilities of mobile network switches to spy the communications of more than 100 mobile phones of high level officials, including the Greek Prime Minister and members of his government. Meanwhile in the United States, it was reported that the national security agency (NSA) illegally wiretapped US residents without a proper wiretap warrant (Risen and Lichtblau; Singel).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, there are a multitude of recent examples where similar monitoring technologies have been employed for mass surveillance, thwarting freedom of speech and oppressing dissidents (Reporters without borders, March 2011; Clayton et al, 1 2006). But even consolidated democratic societies are not immune to the misuse of lawful interception technologies (Prevelakis and Spinellis, 2007;Risen and Lichtblau;Singel;Poulsen;Diffie and Landau, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Wiretap Warrant: Improving the security of ETSI Lawful Interception

Muñoz

Urueña

Aparicio

et al. 2015

Digital Investigation

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Lawful Interception (LI) of data communications is an essential tool for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) in order to investigate criminal activities carried out or coordinated by means of Internet. However, the ability to secretly monitor the activities of citizens also has a great impact on civil rights. Therefore, democratic societies must prevent abuse and ensure that LI is only employed in specific cases with justifiable grounds or a probable cause. Nowadays, in many countries each interception must be authorized by a wiretap warrant, usually issued by a judge. However, this wiretap warrant is merely an administrative document that should be checked by the network or service operator before enabling the monitoring of its customers, whose communications are later handed over to a LEA in plaintext. This paper proposes the idea of employing a Digital Wiretap Warrant (DWW), which further protects the civil liberties, security and privacy of LI by ensuring that monitoring devices can only be enabled with a valid DWW, and by encrypting the captured data so only the authorized LEA is able to decrypt those communications. Moreover, in the proposed DWW framework all digital evidence is securely time-stamped and signed, thus guaranteeing that it has not been tampered with, and that a proper chain of custody has been met. In particular this paper proposes how to apply the DWW concept to the lawful interception framework defined by the ETSI LI Technical Committee, and evaluates how the additional security mechanisms could impact the performance and storage costs of a LI platform.

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“…There is no reason to believe that this is the case. On the contrary, security sabotage has backfired before, e.g., in the case of the mobile-phone system built by Vodafone Greece [12]. The system was intended for use by members of the Greek government and senior civil servants; it contained "built-in wiretapping facilities" for official use.…”

Section: Security Sabotagementioning

confidence: 99%

On the Feasibility of a Technological Response to the Surveillance Morass

Feigenbaum

Koenig

2014

Security Protocols XXII

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Abstract. We consider mass surveillance from a computer-science perspective. After presenting some objections to the behavior of the US National Security Agency and its counterparts in allied nations (emphasizing technical problems associated with such behavior, rather than political, legal, and social problems), we propose a grass-roots, technological response: decentralized cloud services, facilitated by open-source, decentralized configuration-management tools.

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The Athens Affair

Cited by 79 publications

References 0 publications

Keys under doormats

Keys under doormats

Digital Wiretap Warrant: Improving the security of ETSI Lawful Interception

On the Feasibility of a Technological Response to the Surveillance Morass

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