The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) has been secretly monitoring university network traffic since about August 2015. ALL data including all private E-Mail communication and everything else sent from or to the UC Network is analyzed by a not disclosed third party and retained for at least 30 days. Sources: SF Chronicle, Blogpost, Letter from Raechel Nava, Executive Vice President — Chief Operating Officer

The people responsible for implementing the unconditional and extremely invasive surveillance of all people on campus claim that this installation will enhance individual's privacy as it is necessary for improving campus security, and security is a requirement for privacy. lol. or cry. idk.

Yes, security is a requirement for privacy, but analyzing and storing all data, including the most private information, is a particularly bad attempt to achieve the goal. First, it is only a matter of time until the skillful attackers break into the surveillance system and get all data served on a silver tray. Second, the main use-case would be to analyze attacks after they happened, not prevent them. Third, parts of the UC IT are quite outdated and presumably contain lots of security holes. Fixing them first would be much more effective. Fourth, giving a third party access to all private data is a bad idea because it greatly extends the set of trusted people, devices, and networks. Fifth, today they promise to only use the data for protecting the network. When we already store all this data the next generation will legitimately ask, why it is not used to resolve other crime cases as well. A few years later, the government just slightly changes how to define crime.

Again we see the security argument applied as a plain decoy to justify peoples nasty surveillance dreams. Or maybe they just don't know better? Idk. Btw: Berkeley is worldwide one of the top research institutions in Computer Security. Apparently non of the faculty or students were asked to assist with making the network more secure. Instead an external party was secretly contracted.

Notice that the security fence is full of holes

So, what can we do against this. I don't know. Convincing the administration that this form of surveillance it no good might be fruitful in case they just did not know what else to do. I doubt it. And even then other actors are monitoring all your communication anyways. So it seems like as long as there is no better solution available, we all have to protect ourselves a little bit more. We can

• Encrypt our e-mail end-to-end (for OS X, for Thunderbird)
• Encrypt our text messaging and phone-calls end-to-end (Signal for iOS, Signal for Android, alternatively Threema)
• If hosting websites, enable SSL/TLS on them (if not done already, shame on you!)

Not to care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like not caring about free speech because you have nothing to say. - Edward Snowden

Comments allowed and welcome.

Today is Friday, Jan 22, 2016. I will remember this day. In discussions we security researchers often talk about the dumb average computer user. Today I almost became one of them. I received the following email from a spoofed sender address [email protected]:

It tells me that because I am a non-resident alien in the US I need to submit additional information to the IRS because I opened a bank account and I am exempt from "tax withholdings on interest paid". All this was true to me and because I only very quickly skimmed the e-mail I did not detect any major flaws in the language. I would never expect a German authority to send me such an request by email but the Americans do many sensitive stuff online so I was not really surprised by the fact that "IRS" was communicating with me via email. I also gave them my email address on another form a few month ago.

What finally helped me to identify that it was a phishing attempt was that a google search for the indicated Fax number did not give any results. I would have expected to find it on some IRS website. Then I looked at the mail headers which revealed that the sender address was spoofed and finally made it clear that this is indeed a phishing attempt.

I am glad I realized this in the last minute as the information I would have provided on the form would be enough for an attacker to try to call my bank and reset the password with the information or something similar.

I am wondering why the phishing email was so well targeted at me. Or is my view just biased because I directly delete all other phishing mails?

By the way, the IRS never communicates by email. More information on their website.

I am already very excited to spend the next semester at the Saarland University CS grad school. To find new friends as well as enhance collaboration in cryptography research and development in the area I had the idea of founding a Meetup group in Saarbrücken.

In this group all enthusiasts for cryptography and security are welcome. We will discuss recent achievements in cryptography and related areas such as secure systems, implementation, offensive security, theory of computation, and hardware security in weekly meetings. Every meeting has a designated topic and a member will hold a casual presentation on this topic leading to a onward discussion with accompanied dinner. In the course of the evening, different topics may also be discussed with the present members. As the blood alcohol level raises, the discussion will become more and more informal ;)

For our first meetup I proposed the following topics:

• BlindBox: How Network Middleboxes like Firewalls and IDS can deal with encrypted traffic without having the secret key
• SEEED: How SAP can still crunch data when it is encrypted by the customer
• Zero Knowledge Proof: An Overview, zk-SNARKS and how to use them to make Bitcoin really privacy preserving
• Bitcoin: An Introduction
• Secure Multiparty Computation: An Introduction
• BigInteger Libraries: An Overview of available libraries, their design, and how I try to speed up modular multiplication

If you live in the area, please join the meetup group and help to find a time and place for our first meetup!