How Obama’s BlackBerry got secured (2013)
32 comments
·May 5, 2025bigfatkitten
NitpickLawyer
> They also specify the use of "retransmission devices" (mifi routers, basically) in favour of native cellular capability
Yeah, this makes the most sense, there's no way they'd let a president's phone be connected to commercial networks. Tracking alone would be a huge issue, not to mention the plethora of ss7 abuses that can be done.
miki123211
It's so strange to me how little information there is on the internet about how the BlackBerry really worked.
Other phone OSes, both modern ones like iOS and Android, as well as ancient ones like Symbian or even the Nokia 3310 firmware, have their internals well described. All I could find about the BlackBerry was that it used some Java-based OS, but no detailed information about its architecture, conventions, file system layouts, security properties or technical capabilities seems to be available. The communications protocols are just as mysterious, especially on the phone-to-server side. I know it required some kind of carrier integration to work, which makes me think it wasn't just a bog-standard connection over TCP/IP, but I have no idea what it actually was.
There's some information in BlackBerry programming books, which can still be found in the "usual places", some old BlackHat presentations, which seem to mostly focus on the enterprise server component, as well as some company history and brief descriptions of the technical choices made in "Losing the Signal", but that's about it. Even Nintendo's OS is understood much more widely, despite Nintendo being much more secretive and litigious.
Spooky23
They shared information with large customers with NDA. They were old school telecom — very tight.
Everything traversed their network. It was a bonkers architecture that would not fly today. The other thing about that obscurity is it enabled all sorts of weird use cases. Because the devices were identified to the BlackBerry network, you could message without user assignment.
It was common for corporate and political people to use them for unaccountable, compartmentalized communications. You could build ad hoc networks of people without there a record of who was who, and periodically reshuffle the devices to add and remove people. It was basically Nextel DirectConnect for texting / “the wire” for corporate people.
amaccuish
Quite agree, I find it really sad. The most that is out there was about the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, but the docs were always light on details. And yes that one BlackHat presentation about SRP.
I'd love to know more about the GPRS side of things, how their NOCs were connected to carriers, etc.
gjsman-1000
> despite Nintendo being much more secretive and litigious
Eh, kind of? Nintendo has never interfered with solely modding your Switch, or the tools to do so, and will not ban you for loading CFW. Install CFW, overclock your Switch, even cheat in offline games, no interference.
Their lines in the sand for years have been changing your profile image to something arbitrary (and possibly NSFW), installing a pirated game, cheating online, or tampering with system logs. That’s when the ban hammer hits; and the tools for doing those get targeted.
traceroute66
All seems rather cute when these days you can just chat about classified stuff with whoever you like on your presumably unsecured phone.
And then have an unsecured internet line connected to an unsecured computer in your Pentagon office[1]
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hegseth-signal-app-connected...
evanjrowley
I remember encountering one of these secure gov blackberry setups approximately one decade ago. The contractor who managed it up had some deep institutional knowledge. He was probably going to do that one job for the rest of his career until retirement.
jabroni_salad
this website also has some weirdly captivating articles about presidential desk phones in the sidebar.
mschuster91
> On March 16, 2016, AP reported that in February 2009, secretary of state Hillary Clinton also wanted a secured BlackBerry like the one used by Obama, but that NSA denied that request. A month later, Clinton began using a private server, located in the basement of her home, to exchange e-mail messages with her top aides through her regular, non-secure BlackBerry. Later it came out that this rather risky solution was also used for sensitive messages.
A good reminder how IT departments need to provide solutions that actually work and are accessible to everyone. If not, "shadow IT" will emerge, rather sooner than later.
And Clinton was Secretary of State, not some low level clerk.
bunabhucan
And the lesson every us pol seems to have learned is "use signal, use protonmail."
mschuster91
They're using Signal to circumvent the Presidential Records act - the US government nowadays has ample ways to officially and quickly communicate with each other, while being in compliance with recordkeeping and national secrets requirements.
dwood_dev
That is what I assumed as well. In both the current and previous admins.
But as more details come out about the current admins use of signal, this appears to not be the case.
They are using a shitty third party patched version of signal specifically designed to archive messages.
Leaving aside the security issues with the version they are using and the lack of public facing policy, the use of a Signal variant that archives chats is a reasonable compromise.
Instead of walling off users, creating a barrier to use and therefore extensive bypassing of the security standards, they have met users where they are and provided them with what the user cannot distinguish from official signal. This allows them to interface internally and externally through signal, preserving records and maintaining a much better level of security than the other options.
This represents a huge breach of trust between external parties and government signal users, but most of the government signal users are probably completely unaware that it's being logged.
My issue is not that they are using Signal. I think it's one of the better options. My issue is that they use a shitty version of it when there should be an in house maintained version for government use.
gnabgib
(2013) Discussion at the time (83 points, 32 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6615066
Jaxkr
> This would mean the White House Communications Agency has to carry such a secure base station wherever the president goes.
We used to take security so seriously.
Aloha
The reality is that modern (meaning LTE) public networks are more secure today, than they have been, its also trivial to bring an LTE base station with you now - with the hardware at this point being no more complex than a controller driven wifi network.
null
blamestross
I'm increasingly of the belief that modern governments have lost all advantage in the space of security hardware and software. They only have OpSec and a monopoly on violence to leverage in order to have an improved security situation over the public sector.
They don't seem to be using that OpSec superiority effectively right now.
I work public-sector in supply chain security and I am terrified that the situation we currently have in the corporate world is actually the best there is.
mrweasel
> I'm increasingly of the belief that modern governments have lost all advantage in the space of security hardware and software.
What do you mean? Lost the advantage as in "commercial solutions are equally good or better" or as in they just don't use the options they have available because they are more cumbersome?
Quite frankly I'm starting to doubt if leaders of nations should be having electronic devices at their disposal. Take away their phones, laptops, social media access, anything online. Everyone would be better of.
blamestross
In terms of technical abilities: - "commercial solutions are equally good or better"
The way governments can have an advantage is in where and how those services are managed. Events like "signalgate" scare me because it means we are not leveraging that effectively due to bad managers.
relaxing
Okay? What evidence do you base this on?
ceejayoz
Photos of them using Signal on iPhones?
throwanem
Is that because Signal is as good or because they refuse to listen to anyone telling them to stop using it? Not a serious question, I know it'll be a decade or three before it can be answered from open sources.
But of course I forgot, it wasn't really even Signal they were using...
Spooky23
That’s more about officials acting illegally avoiding accountability by shielding their communications from their government. (Of course there’s probably a backlog of foreign governments on those devices.)
blamestross
I can only speculate based on publicly available information.
When a was in grad-school, "state level actors" were the boogeyman. You were told to just assume that everything would be compromised to them.
I ended up specializing in p2p systems (distributed hash tables, overlay networks, communication systems) and "State Level Actors" become "in scope" for me. Modern cryptography is focused on the capabilities of hypothetical computers and making radically more computational power required than is reasonable to expect of current human economies. Backdoors in the codebases for encryption is a fun hypothetical, but the level of scrutiny they are under would require a conspiracy beyond any i could imagine to hide.
Eclipse and Sybil attacks were the real threats. Those are Operational attacks, not Signals.
Now that I have spend a decade in the security industry in larger corporations. "State Level Actors" are entirely in the threat model. We don't talk about it explicitly, but these companies stand to loose globally if any one government compromised them. Government funded actors are assumed to be the primary threat. Supply chain attacks like XZ are the ones that scare us, the ones we might have missed. That came from superiority in operations not technical superiority. They actively pay me and a bunch of other people a LOT of money to actively detect and prevent issues like this.
The other side of the argument is a human organizational one. The story of this decade of military spending is outsourcing. Biden's Supply Chain Security EO and the new DoD software procurement requirements are bandaids on gaping wounds.
Even with it's massive defence spending budget, the TLAs couldn't keep up with the industry while also securing all its software. They have 3rd party dependencies too. Assuming that they don't just allways directly outsource.
And why bother? These companies have the entirety of human communications MITMed. Why bother with a complex secret system when a FISA warrant is cheaper and more efficient. PRISM(For attack) and TOR(For defense) stand out as successes of operational attacks. They don't need technological superiority.
I fully expect TLAs maintain an android fork and linux forks, but that is opsec for dependency management, not adding special sauce. The industry simply has more resources and more eyes on the problem than the government could ever afford.
The last part is simple "Brain Drain". The people who are really good at this generally don't want to work for the government and have done too many drugs to ever get clearance. Unless they have a lot of security engineer salaries in classified budgets they also can't afford us. Governments have direct agents that are underpaid and underskilled and they have working relationships with criminal organizations who work deniable offense for them.
Opsec is clearly their leverage-able resource, why not lean into it almost exclusively?
yapyap
Someone listens to the 404media podcast
Jaxkr
And now we have our top defense officials using a fork of Signal which sends copies of messages to a third party.
https://www.404media.co/mike-waltz-accidentally-reveals-obsc... http://archive.today/LyWDy
chme
Not only that, but the software also contained login information to the AWS backend archive servers:
https://www.techspot.com/news/107792-hacker-breaches-telemes...
janice1999
... the third party being run by a foreign 'former' spy whose country was being discussed in those messages.
null
These days, NSA's Commercial Solutions for Classified program[1] addresses a lot of these sorts of secure mobility use cases.
The underlying design principle behind CSfC is that the CNSA algorithms[2], when properly implemented are good enough to protect information classified up to TOP SECRET on their own. However, there's still a risk of exposure due to broken implementations, active exploitation or operational error.
To mitigate this, CSfC's "capability packages" (reference architectures) typically use two or more cryptographic layers of different provenance to reduce the risk that a vulnerability in one layer could be used to compromise the whole solution. For a VPN for example, they will use two tunnels; an inner tunnel using a solution from one vendor, and an outer tunnel from another.
There are other considerations apart from cryptography. They also specify the use of "retransmission devices" (mifi routers, basically) in favour of native cellular capability, presumably to mitigate the risk of a cellular baseband exploit being used to compromise a classified handset.
[1] https://www.nsa.gov/Resources/Commercial-Solutions-for-Class...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_National_Security_A...