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Comment by orthoxerox | Hacker News Reader

If we mentally replace criminals with dissidents and France/Britain with PRC, what could EncroChat have done differently to shulield its users?

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Compartmentalize into small groups aka cells. It is centralizing around EncroChat which was the mistake here. All the eggs in one basket will always carry this type of risk.

There is also another difference. Drug dealers usually wants to get rich, and have no real interest in any larger cause than their own profit.

Dissidents are sometimes willing to sacrifice themselves for the larger cause. What is important for such a dissident is not that nobody gets caught, but that the events are beneficial for the cause and that certain key individuals are protected. Even martyrdom is useful for a dissident, but rarely to a drug dealer.

Dissidents should keep working in cells to minimize the risk of discovery. The drop hollows the stone is the working principle for dissidents. The most influential dissident may have a very small network of contacts but with a large fan-out a few layers down. This tactic is for example how Bin Ladin was able to stay in hiding, he was meeting very few people and it was hard to find him because of that even when he was the top target.

In reality the nature of drug dealing would make it tricky to implement a cell structure. If you look at the IRA, implementing it meant in theory it was very hard for one cell to know another and only certain parts would supply arms, intelligence etc. This resulted in a drop in attacks for a long time because of the difficulties in keeping to that. Though it did of course decrease infiltration for awhile. Until the UK found the weaknesses and targeted those who had permission to oversee and deal with everything - the internal security section and leadership.

Drugs is a much more dynamic industry where are some points there is a need for a lot of contact, travel, managing big groups of individuals...Not that it couldn't work that way but it would be very hard when people are out making money all day rather then at home in a dissident sense waiting months/years until a short/fast operation.

I think the only way to do so would be to deny themselves the ability to push software to customers (speculating that this is how it was attacked), which itself is an attack vector. It basically seems impossible to do securely if you can't trust the software on the phone, short of providing a separate device that decrypts and encrypts messages and shows them, but any software that device runs would be the attack surface.

That said, it's probably far more likely the crypto was done incorrectly from the off (and probable that other services have the same flaws) but the authorities needed a cheaper vulnerability to burn in public so as not to disrupt other investigations that are no doubt ongoing.

If the adversary controls the phone network and the baseband processor - not much.

If only a small percentage of the population buys encro phones, it might even be worthwhile for the authorities to log and plot all their movements and interactions, all the time. Even without breaking encryption, the traffic analysis alone would give valuable insights.

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