They didn't do their due diligence in encrypting data going through leased fibers -- they should have had the foresight to realize what a phenomenally bad thing this was. They didn't, hence why I'll never trust them again.
Do you also blame your car company when a thief breaks into it? Do you never trust banks again if a bank robbery happens? They were working on it, but full-on encryption everywhere within your internal network is expensive, and one tends to not imagine that buried dark fiber is dug up and tapped by one's own government.
Let's say that they encrypted everything, and then you learn the NSA had kidnapped the children of one of their network engineers and forced him to turn over some keys. Again, whose brand deserves to be damaged here, the company, or the immoral nation state with vast military industrial resources at its disposal?
Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks.
Kidnapped their children? Get a hold of yourself here. Google is a tech company, it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that they get the big parts of their security model right. Not encrypting data going through leased (or even their own) fibers? Big, big mistake. NSA and US government aside, Google dropped the ball big-time here.
> Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks.
Funny you say that. Because I was pretty much a Google fanboy before all of this happened (oh, and their recent changes wrt privacy policies). I am very angry at the government, but that is a separate issue.
Security is based on threat model. The spooks have capabilities that far exceed the threat models most companies assume from private blackhats. You think it is obvious to assume in hindsight that the government would dig up and tap your dark fiber, but you don't think it obvious the government would plant spies to do in-side-the-data-center taps. Now what? Encrypt all data between switches? The Soviets didn't think their undersea cables could be tapped either, and no one can claim they were insufficiently paranoid.
My point is, I don't want Silicon Valley in an arms race with the US government. The government is supposed to protect its citizens and companies, not work to undermine them. Google is working on rolling out better security, just like they eventually rolled out SSL everywhere before most other companies. They are at the forefront on this, but it still takes time and costs money. But even though they are spending time and resources on this, I would still like the US government to cut it out.
At the end of the day, Google lost. To a considerable extent, cloud lost. People who were trusting Google with their data lost. What is ostensibly true at this point at is that Google could have done something to have prevented this. All else is immaterial. Just like I would expect to lose business if I made a mistake and had data compromised (because doing X and Y was too difficult or too costly for me to do, because it was 'outside' my control, because I was too inept, or whatever else), Google should expect to lose some business the same way. If security is based on a threat model -- and it eventually loses, it was bad security.
Well, it would help if you would write in a way that is not insulting and condescending.
There's no "if" about it. All security is based on threat model, the lock on your front door is based on the threat of the average criminal, and not Watergate burglars. Are you guilty of bad security? Is it your fault if your front door lock gets picked because you made assumptions about the sophistication of your attacker?
You originally said "I'll never trust them again", but that beg's the question, just who will you trust? Unless you are using end-to-end encryption with everyone, there is no way to secure against NSA interception, and pretty much all of Google's cloud competitors are actually worse in terms of deployed security. And assuming end-to-end is secure is basically just assuming a threat model where the NSA or Chinese government can't plant infected firmware or hardware in your devices.
How about not musing out loud that people who are criticizing companies just "want to hate on these companies", if you're entertaining the idea of not being insulting and condescending.
Google is a company that's been leading the way to get everyone on the cloud. It turns out what it's also been doing is making mass surveillance massively easy due to poor security practices. One individual having bad locks is not analogous to what is at play here. You keep suggesting that Google should get a free pass because the adversary in this case was too sophisticated of a player: no, that does not matter, that is an excuse. Don't give me excuses. Google makes billions, it should simply have done a better job. Your earlier post took issue with Google's brand being tarnished unfairly, this is what I'm talking about to you right now, so the question of just 'who' I will trust is not very relevant.
To answer your question anyway: basically I'm going to pull away from the cloud as much as I can. No more google apps for me, no more gmail, no more anything where I end up putting my personal data or my clients' data anywhere but on my dedicated servers -- and using end-to-end encryption when any data needs to travel out. That does not remove the possibility of getting compromised, it just mitigates it.
I don't think there are many people who disagree with me that there's been a huge amount of unwarranted snark recently. The uProxy release for example. Don't compare that with using words like "stupid".
>no more anything where I end up putting my personal data or my clients' data anywhere but on my dedicated servers
The probability that your servers would be compromised by actual damaging threats (hackers, malware, viruses, botnets) is far higher than that of Google, so I hope if your servers get hacked, you will similarly berate yourself and not make excuses that you should have done better and spent 10x more security than you are now. How many actual penetrations have occured of Google infrastructure where thieves (not government) made off with actual information that they'd put to damaging use, vs that of other smaller hosts? Everything you do has tradeoffs.
You keep making hand wave arguments about what Google could have or should have done, again, totally points about the threat models and historical context. When this program started, by some accounts in 2007, the vast majority of Web traffic wasn't even secured by HTTPS, no one was using channel-ID or forward security, and the majority of SMTP traffic was not protected by TLS. In fact, even today, only 50% of email traffic is TLS protected. In 2007, fewer Google services were probably multi-datacenter replicated as well. Encrypting the dark fiber would have been useless back then when the front door was left unlocked.
So, let's try to imagine a hypothetical conversation of some security engineers when new data centers got set up for replication:
Engineer #1: Dude, we should encrypt traffic on our inter-DC traffic.
Engineer #2: It's a buried dark fiber.
Engineer #1: Yeah, but the NSA could dig it up and tap it.
Engineer #2: That's illegal, and besides, it's a theoretical threat. We have a bigger practical threat, right now, anyone could just tap all front-end traffic, because most incoming user traffic is not HTTPS.
Engineer #1: You're right, let's get everyone on HTTPS first. Let's upgrade browsers, and Chrome, with better cipher suites. Let's add Channel-ID. Let's try to get SMTP users to use TLS.
The point isn't about excuses, it's about understanding at each point in time, what the weakest link in the chain is. The NSA taps of your email traffic might be worrisome, but the reality is, the Russians slurping up your credit cards, passwords, and doing MITM's to install botnets have far greater, actual practical damaging effects on you and your customers.
In an ideal world, everything would be secured against all possible attacks from day one, but internet infrastructure is rarely ideal. I started on the internet in the 80s in an era with zero encryption and where many services didn't even have passwords. We have gradually made things more and more secure, but getting there is going to take time. It's unfortunate that Google's efforts to secure it's fiber didn't happen a few years earlier, but if they did happen a few years earlier, it wouldn't have a made a difference, because upstream attacks were far more effective back then.
what if that government who could tap into fiber was not US government? I think any communication outside the confines of corporate buildings should be encrypted.
> Kidnapped their children? Get a hold of yourself here.
It's supposed to be an extreme example. He's trying to probe your boundaries -- if you'd forgive them in the kidnapping example, he could then name a somewhat less extreme example, like if the CIA had broken into a Googler's home to plant a recording device.
But, since you totally dodged the question, the opportunity was missed.
As has been pointed out, Google owns a lot of fiber. When you have stuff that spans thousands of miles, there's a very real possibility that a bad actor can try to tap into it.
> Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies
Because they promote themselves as tech-based companies, yet abdicated their professional duty to design secure systems because insecurity makes for easier monetization.
You would very much blame a car manufacturer when it turned out that all of its cars were keyed the same.
There is no such thing as a secure system, there is only conditional security. And what does unencrypted internal network traffic within a company have to do with monetization?
Pretty much all regular door locks on the majority of homes in the US are pickable. Have you installed an unpickable lock on your home?
It may be the case that the tech companies need to have their brands damaged for the greater good, at this point. If it turns out that G and Y are operating in an environment (USA) where a rogue government endangers consumers and prevents legit business from being done, G and Y need to either remove themselves from that environment or fall.
