20170414 Zum Umgang mit Daten in Notfällen

Burn after reading

Even secret services are not good prepared for emergencies. Everyone should think about the safty, the backup, and if necessary the destruction of its own data, some hints here.

The Intercept reports from Snowden Documents of a CIA report about the emergency landing of a US Navy spy plane in China after collision with a Chinese fighter in April 2001

Now, a comprehensive Navy-NSA report completed three months after the collision, and included among documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, finally reveals extensive details about the incident, the actions crew members took to destroy equipment and data, and the secrets that were exposed to China — which turned out to be substantial though not catastrophic.

After the collison the pilot, tried to regain control of the aircraft, he ordered everyone to prepare to bail. With wind roaring inside the cabin, warning lights flashing, and the plane plummeting, crew members struggled to communicate over the noise while donning parachutes, survival vests, and helmets. They were lined up and ready to jump into the sea, the crew member said, when Osborn managed to stabilize the plane and ordered the crew to prepare to land in the water. But then Osborn changed his mind tried to land in China. They had 20 minutes "to prepare" their equipment.

The only problem was, they didn’t have a clue what they needed to do. It wasn’t the first time cryptologic sources and methods were at risk of compromise. In 1968, North Korea captured the USS Pueblo and acquired a large inventory of highly sensitive intelligence materials from the ship. Since then, crews were supposed to be trained in emergency destruction procedures. But that didn’t happen with the EP-3E crew. Only one member of the crew had ever participated in an in-flight emergency destruction drill.

The crew improvised by dropping laptops on the floor, stomping on them, bashing them against a desk, and bending them across a chair — all methods that would have been insufficient to ensure the Chinese could not recover data from them. The crew managed to jettison some cryptographic keying material, as well as codebooks and two laptops out the emergency hatch. But 16 cryptographic keys, other codebooks and laptops, and a large computer for processing signals intelligence remained on board. As for the signals collection equipment, they destroyed the display terminals and controls but not the tuners and signals-processors, the most critical parts of the systems. The plane also had a number of cryptographic voice and data devices onboard — for securing communication and data transmissions between the plane and home base — that didn’t get destroyed, although the crew managed to zero-out the memory on them.

Investigators uncovered a lot of surprises during their analysis of the incident. They found, for example, that the crew had a lot of unnecessary classified data onboard, which was needlessly put at risk of compromise. They had, for example, entire codebooks as well as nearly a month’s worth of top-secret keying material. The exposure wasn’t detrimental since the military changed its keys daily and within 15 hours after the spy plane landed in China, authorities had retired all of that day’s keys and replaced them with new ones. But a worldwide key the military used to authenticate GPS data had 250,000 users worldwide, and they all had to be notified before the key could be replaced — this took nearly two weeks. The concern about the exposed crypto material wasn’t that China could use the keys to decrypt that day’s U.S. communications, but that it provided insight into U.S. cryptologic methods.

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