Posted on 04/13/2019 8:01:09 PM PDT by palmer
Ecuador on Saturday revealed criminal hacking charges against Ola Bini, a computer programmer with ties to recently arrested WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
“The State Prosecutor General’s Office filed charges against a Swedish citizen, aged 36, for his alleged participation in the crime of assault on the integrity of computer systems,” the agency said in a statement. The announcement did not mention Mr. Bini by name, but it followed reports that he was ordered held for investigative purposes after being detained at a Quito airport Thursday within hours of Ecuador ejecting Mr. Assange from its London embassy.
“It’s up to the justice system to determine if he committed a crime,” Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo told Ecuadorian media Friday. “But we can’t allow Ecuador to become a center for piracy and spying. That period in our history is over.”
Mr. Bini had visited the WikiLeaks publisher at the embassy roughly a dozen times during the last few years, claimed Ms. Romo. She said that he was close to Mr. Assange and that Ecuador had “sufficient evidence that he was collaborating in attempts to destabilize the government.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
He could have also handed out data on USB drives. But the yubikey is a somewhat better way to hand out an "identity" to an ally in person (or through the physical mail). The person also needs to know some passwords to get to the accounts (the yubikey is the second factor).
If you are hacking to let the American people know that the government is illegally spying on them like Bradley Manning did— WHO CARES?
Bradley Manning stole 750,000 files- among them files containing identifying information of people working with our forces in Afghanistan, and files sent in by soldiers in action on the ground, and gave [sold, according to some reports] this information to an unvetted FOREIGNER who then used them to build his organization and lure even more eople into sealing information that doesn’t belong to them.
Manning should have been tried and shot.
What’s a “yubikey?”
Sounds like the coup d'etat against Trump and the farce they put on him. This guy is an individual he doesn't have the power of the president.
Not = Note
So he was arrested so they could stop him from further developing an encrypted chat program that governments would have a problem hacking?
I don’t have enough information yet. Though that is possible.
The next time someone (same person or someone else) puts the key in their computer and tries to loing to that same website, the website will ask who they are. If the user says "Whoever123" then the website sends a message to the browser/key to ask for a specific response. If the response matches the one sent during registration, then the website is satisfied that the person with the key is Whoever123.
That description is using the key as a first (only) factor. More often the key is used as a second factor. Everything is the same in the registration step. But in the login step the user enters Whoever123 and their password. The remaining steps are the same, the website sends the message to the browser/key to see if it is the same key. In all cases, the website is keeping a database matching users to keys.
So very simply, the key is the first or second factor needed to login somewhere. It works very well for almost any type of online access e.g. a bank account.
What the wikileaks people could use them for (I'm not sure) is putting their secret material on a cloud server somewhere, e.g. an email account, and requiring the key to get to login. With a single factor, and a website designed for single factor, the key itself, and nothing else, enables access to the information. With most websites however the key is the second factor and the new user has to be told a username and password and given the key.
There are fancier yubikeys that do more such as encrypting and decrypting information without going to a website. For example I just glanced at their site and saw "Full Disk Encryption + YubiKey" which is certainly another possible use of the device. With my encrypted laptop, I have to know a passcode to unlock the disk encryption. If I used the yubikey, the bad guys can still try to beat a passcode out of me which would not be fun, but if someone else had the yubikey the bad guys would not get the data.
Encryption: No one else can read your instant messages.
Authentication: You are assured the correspondent is who you think it is.
Deniability: The messages you send do not have digital signatures that are checkable by a third party. Anyone can forge messages after a conversation to make them look like they came from you. However, during a conversation, your correspondent is assured the messages he sees are authentic and unmodified.
Perfect forward secrecy: If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised.
The deniability is the most interesting. Normally PKI is semi-permanent and everyone knows you by your signature, made with the private key that only you control. But here it looks like disposable private keys: https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/Protocol-v3-4.1.1.html My question is how does Alice know who Bob is? It seems as though they first need a traditional PKI solution to authenticate, then they can use this to send messages. Of course the traditional solution could use a yubikey (hardware private key) handed off in person.
Yes but Assange was a publisher like the New York times in the Pentagon Papers that endangered our men in the field. No one blamed the New York times!! Assange is a hero for exposing our government spying on you, Don’t you agree or are you down with that?
And the government employed Bradley Manning with top secret clearance knowing he was a mentally deranged homosexual who later mutilated his sex organs but he remains a male because he has an x and y chromosome and can’t change that but how could the government be so stupid ? Where is the recrimination for hiring that sick faggot? Assange is a national hero.
I know people don’t often like National Review any more, but their yesterday’s article gave an important reminder of what Assange considers “transparency”.
“The idea that Assange is engaged in a campaign against the United States is supported by a 2008 leak that had little or no justification on the grounds of transparency in the public interest — of a classified 2004 report that included details of the workings of the U.S. Army’s Warlock system for jamming the homemade bombs called IEDs set off by cell phone or radio transmitter. The report concerned the problematic way the jammers interfered with regular military communications. But its publication ensured that anyone anywhere in the world who wanted to figure out how to defeat the Warlock now had the means to do so.”
Thank you for that review.
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