She wasn’t just a disgruntled employee, but someone who truly believed that exposing Facebook was the only way to save it.Ĩ Teams at Facebook - owned by Meta - “were understaffed, under absurd deadlines, and more often than not ignored when they came up with real, if difficult, ideas on how to change the platform for the better,” according to the book. Still, he had nothing but faith in Haugen’s intentions. Haugen’s earnest belief that “if she didn’t expose what was known inside Facebook, millions of people would likely die” struck him as rather grandiose and melodramatic. In the beginning, Horwitz was intrigued but cautious. “The uproar would plunge Facebook into months of crisis, with Congress, European regulators, and average users questioning Facebook’s role.” Over the coming months, Haugen would bring Horwitz “tens of thousands of pages of confidential documents, showing the depth and breadth of the harm being done to everyone from teenage girls to the victims of Mexican cartels,” writes Horwitz. Neither of them could have anticipated how far that rabbit hole would take them. Instead, she suggested meeting at a hiking trail for privacy - even even sent Horwitz the address via an encrypted messaging app.Ĩ Haugen delivered “tens of thousands of pages of confidential documents, showing the depth and breadth of the harm being done to everyone from teenage girls to the victims of Mexican cartels,” Horwitz writes. Haugen didn’t want to talk by email or even phone, insisting it was too dangerous. “People needed to understand what was going on at Facebook, she said, and she had been taking some notes that she thought might be useful in explaining it,” Horwitz writes in his new book, “ Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets” (Doubleday). A mid-level product manager on Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, Haugen, 35, had only been with the social network for a little less than a year and a half. On paper, she didn’t seem like the most obvious candidate for a whistleblower. But then he reached out to Frances Haugen. On a December afternoon in 2020, Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz drove to Redwood Regional Park, just east of Oakland, Calif., for a mysterious meeting.įor months, he’d been working on a story about Facebook, albeit with little luck finding anyone from the company willing to talk. Woman claims liberal NYC moms’ Facebook group banned her for standing with IsraelĮx-Meta employee testifies Instagram parent failed to protect teens, including his daughter That's what allows an attacker to get the key and decrypt all traffic, according to the researchers.Jilted would-be bride selling engagement ring on Facebook plagued by ‘creepy’ men on listingīig Tech loses bid to toss lawsuits alleging social media platforms harmed children The weakness in GEA-1, the oldest algorithm developed in 1998, is that it provides only 40-bit security. 'This implies that the weakness in GEA-1 is unlikely to occur by chance, indicating that the security level of 40 bits is due to export regulations.' Researchers dubbed the attack 'divide-and-conquer,' and said it was 'rather straightforward.' In short, the attack allows someone who can intercept cellphone data traffic to recover the key used to encrypt the data and then decrypt all traffic. When trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm, the researchers wrote that (to simplify), they tried to design a similar encryption algorithm using a random number generator often used in cryptography and never came close to creating an encryption scheme as weak as the one actually used: 'In a million tries we never even got close to such a weak instance,' they wrote. The researchers said they obtained two encryption algorithms, GEA-1 and GEA-2, which are proprietary and thus not public, 'from a source.' They then analyzed them and realized they were vulnerable to attacks that allowed for decryption of all traffic. Researchers from several universities in Europe found that the encryption algorithm GEA-1, which was used in cellphones when the industry adopted GPRS standards in 2G networks, was intentionally designed to include a weakness that at least one cryptography expert sees as a backdoor. After the paper was published, the group that designed the algorithm confirmed this was the case. Thus, they speculate that a weakness was intentionally put into the algorithm. Motherboard: The paper has sent shockwaves through the encryption community because of what it implies: The researchers believe that the mathematical probability of the weakness being introduced on accident is extremely low. A weakness in the algorithm used to encrypt cellphone data in the 1990s and 2000s allowed hackers to spy on some internet traffic, according to a new research paper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |