Everyone's Spying on You

After explaining the workings and eventual decryption of the Enigma code in his terrific book, The Code Book, Simon Singh pointed out that the British kept the fact a secret even after World War II. Why? To keep tabs on countries who still used the Enigma code, says this Wikipedia article. In fact, they went a step further than just tapping into countries that happened to use the Enigma code:

“After the end of World War II, the Allies sold captured Enigma machines, still widely considered secure, to developing countries.”

Were you appalled by that? Fast forward to present day, says security expert, Bruce Schneier, and things are actually lot worse:

1)      The Pentagon recently stopped selling phones made by Chinese manufacturers like ZTE and Huawei on military bases. Why? Because they might be spying on their users.

2)     In 2012, the US was worried about Chinese made Internet routers for the same reason.

3)     Both China and the US banned use of Kaspersky’s anti-virus products because it was a Russian company and there were worries that the Russian government had a “backdoor” into computers world over via the software.

4)     In 2017, India identified 42 smartphone apps that China subverted and asked its military to stop using those apps.

5)     Back in 1997, there were rumours that the Israeli company Check Point had put in backdoors into its software for the Israeli government.

The common theme in all these examples?

“If a country doesn't trust another country, then it can't trust that country's computer products.”

With smartphones, things get even more murkier. It’s possible to add backdoors even at the computer chip level. And most chips are made in China, Taiwan, Malaysia or Indonesia, so where does that leave us? And then there are all those apps. Or how about the software written by the big companies?

“Think of how many countries' citizens are writing software for Apple or Microsoft or Google.”

As Schneier says:

“Supply-chain security is an incredibly complex problem… We can't trust anyone, yet we have no choice but to trust everyone. Our phones, computers, software and cloud systems are touched by citizens of dozens of different countries, any one of whom could subvert them at the demand of their government.”

 So what’s the solution? Schneier doesn’t have an answer; governments don’t either. But not using smartphones isn’t an option either because that genie came out of the bottle long back and it ain’t going back…