Why is Signal asking users to set a PIN, or “A few thoughts on Secure Value Recovery”

Over the past several months, Signal has been rolling out a raft of new features to make its app more usable. One of those features has recently been raising a bit of controversy with users. This is a contact list backup feature based on a new system called Secure Value Recovery, or SVR. The SVR feature allows Signal to upload your contacts into Signal’s servers without — ostensibly — even Signal itself being able to access it.

The new Signal approach has created some trauma with security people, due to the fact that it was recently enabled without a particularly clear explanation. For a shorter summary of the issue, see this article. In this post, I want to delve a little bit deeper into why these decisions have made me so concerned, and what Signal is doing to try to mitigate those concerns.

What’s Signal, and why does it matter?

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Signal is an open-source app developed by Moxie Marlinkspike’s Signal Technology Foundation. Signal has received a lot of love from the security community. There are basically two reasons for this. First: the Signal app has served as a sort of technology demo for the Signal Protocol, which is the fundamental underlying cryptography that powers popular apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and all their billions of users.

Second, the Signal app itself is popular with security-minded people, mostly because the app, with its relatively smaller and more technical user base, has tended towards a no-compromises approach to the security experience. Wherever usability concerns have come into conflict with security, Signal has historically chosen the more cautious and safer approach — as compared to more commercial alternatives like WhatsApp. As a strategy for obtaining large-scale adoption, this is a lousy one. If your goal is to build a really secure messaging product, it’s very impressive.

Let me give an example.

Encrypted messengers like WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage routinely back up your text message content and contact lists to remote cloud servers. These backups undo much of the strong security offered by end-to-end encryption — since they make it much easier for hackers and governments to obtain your plaintext content. You can disable these backups, but it’s surprisingly non-obvious to do it right (for me, at least). The larger services justify this backup default by pointing out that their less-technical users tend be more worried about lost message history than by theoretical cloud hacks.

Signal, by contrast, has taken a much more cautious approach to backup. In June of this year, they finally added a way to manually transfer message history from one iPhone to another, and this transfer now involves scanning QR codes. For Android, cloud backup is possible, if users are willing to write down a thirty-digit encryption key. This is probably really annoying for many users, but it’s absolutely fantastic for security. Similarly, since Signal relies entirely on phone numbers in your contacts database (a point that, admittedly, many users hate), it never has to back up your contact lists to a server.

What’s changed recently is that Signal has begun to attract a larger user base. As users with traditional expectations enter the picture, they’ve been unhappy with Signal’s limitations. In response, the signal developers have begun to explore ways by which they can offer these features without compromising security. This is just plain challenging, and I feel for the developers.

One area in which they’ve tried to square the circle is with their new solution for contacts backup: a system called “secure value recovery.”

What’s Secure Value Recovery?

Signal’s Secure Value Recovery (SVR) is a cloud-based system that allows users to store encrypted data on Signal’s servers — such that even Signal cannot access it — without the usability headaches that come from traditional encryption key management. At the moment, SVR is being used to store users’ contact lists and not message content, although that data may be on the menu for backup in the future.

The challenge in storing encrypted backup data is that strong encryption requires strong (or “high entropy”) cryptographic keys and passwords. Since most of us are terrible at selecting, let alone remembering strong passwords, this poses a challenging problem. Moreover, these keys can’t just be stored on your device — since the whole point of backup is to deal with lost devices.

The goal of SVR is to allow users to protect their data with much weaker passwords that humans can actually can memorize, such as a 4-digit PIN. With traditional password-based encryption, such passwords would be completely insecure: a motivated attacker who obtained your encrypted data from the Signal servers could simply run a dictionary attack — trying all 10,000 such passwords in a few seconds or minutes, and thus obtaining your data.

Signal’s SVR solves this problem in an age-old way: it introduces a computer that even Signal can’t hack. More specifically, Signal makes use of a new extension to Intel processors called Software Guard eXtensions, or SGX. SGX allows users to write programs, called “enclaves”, that run in a special virtualized processor mode. In this mode, enclaves are invisible to and untouchable by all other software on a computer, including the operating system. If storage is needed, enclaves can persistently store (or “seal”) data, such that any attempt to tamper with the program will render that data inaccessible. (Update: as a note, Signal’s SVR does not seal data persistently. I included this in the draft thinking that they did, but I misremembered this from the technology preview.)

Signal’s SVR deploys such an enclave program on the Signal servers. This program performs a simple function: for each user, it generates and stores a random 256-bit cryptographic secret “seed” along with a hash of the user’s PIN. When a user contacts the server, it can present a hash of its PIN to the enclave and ask for the cryptographic seed. If the hash matches what the enclave has stored, the server delivers the secret seed to the client, which can mix it together with the PIN. The result is a cryptographically strong encryption key that can be used to encrypt or decrypt backup data. (Update: thanks to Dino Dai Zovi for correcting some details in here.)

The key to this approach is that the encryption key now depends on both the user’s password and a strong cryptographic secret stored by an SGX enclave on the server. If SGX does its job, then even a user who hacks into the Signal servers — and here we include the Signal developers themselves, perhaps operating under duress — will be unable to retrieve this user’s secret value. The only way to access the backup encryption key is to actually run the enclave program and enter the user’s hashed PIN. To prevent brute-force guessing, the enclave keeps track of the number of incorrect PIN-entry attempts, and will only allow a limited number before it locks that user’s account entirely.

This is an elegant approach, and it’s conceptually quite similar to systems already deployed by Apple and Google, who use dedicated Hardware Security Modules to implement the trusted component, rather than SGX.

The key weakness of the SVR approach is that it depends strongly on the security and integrity of SGX execution. As we’ll discuss in just a moment, SGX does not exactly have a spotless record.

What happens if SGX isn’t secure?

Anytime you encounter a system that relies fundamentally on the trustworthiness of some component — particularly a component that exists in commodity hardware — your first question should be: “what happens if that component isn’t actually trustworthy?”

With SVR that question takes on a great deal of relevance.

Let’s step back. Recall that the goal of SVR is to ensure three things:

1. The backup encryption key is based, at least in part, on the user’s chosen password. Strong passwords mean strong encryption keys.
2. Even with a weak password, the encryption key will still have cryptographic strength. This comes from the integration of a random seed that gets chosen and stored by SGX.
3. No attacker will be able to brute-force their way through the password space. This is enforced by SGX via guessing limits.

Note that only the first goal is really enforced by cryptography itself. And this goal will only be achieved if the user selects a strong (high-entropy) password. For an example of what that looks like, see the picture at right.

The remaining goals rely entirely on the integrity of SGX. So let’s play devil’s advocate, and think about what happens to SVR if SGX is not secure.

If an attacker is able to dump the memory space of a running Signal SGX enclave, they’ll be able to expose secret seed values as well as user password hashes. With those values in hand, attackers can run a basic offline dictionary attack to recover the user’s backup keys and passphrase. The difficulty of completing this attack depends entirely on the strength of a user’s password. If it’s a BIP39 phrase, you’ll be fine. If it’s a 4-digit PIN, as strongly encouraged by the UI of the Signal app, you will not be.

(The sensitivity of this data becomes even worse if your PIN happens to be the same as your phone passcode. Make sure it’s not!)

Similarly, if an attacker is able to compromise the integrity of SGX execution: for example, to cause the enclave to run using stale “state” rather than new data, then they might be able to defeat the limits on the number of incorrect password (“retry”) attempts. This would allow the attacker to run an active guessing attack on the enclave until they recover your PIN. (Edit: As noted above, this shouldn’t be relevant in SVR because data is stored only in RAM, and never sealed or written to disk.)

A final, and more subtle concern comes from the fact that Signal’s SVR also allows for “replication” of the backup database. This addresses a real concern on Signal’s part that the backup server could fail — resulting in the loss of all user backup data. This would be a UX nightmare, and understandably, Signal does not want users to be exposed to it.

To deal with this, Signal’s operators can spin up a new instance of the Signal server on a cloud provider. The new instance will have a second copy of the SGX enclave software, and this software can request a copy of the full seed database from the original enclave. (There’s even a sophisticated consensus protocol to make sure the two copies stay in agreement about the state of the retry counters, once this copy is made.)

The important thing to keep in mind is that the security of this replication process depends entirely on the idea that the original enclave will only hand over its data to another instance of the same enclave software running on a secure SGX-enabled processor. If it was possible to trick the original enclave about the status of the new enclave — for example, to convince it to hand the database over to a system that was merely emulating an SGX enclave in normal execution mode — then a compromised Signal operator would be able to use this mechanism to exfiltrate a plaintext copy of the database. This would break the system entirely.

Prevention against this attack is accomplished via another feature of Intel SGX, which is called “remote attestation“. Essentially, each Intel processor contains a unique digital signing key that allows it to attest to the fact that it’s a legitimate Intel processor, and it’s running a specific piece of enclave software. These signatures can be verified with the assistance of Intel, which allows enclaves to verify that they’re talking directly to another legitimate enclave.

The power of this system also contains its fragility: if a single SGX attestation key were to be extracted from a single SGX-enabled processor, this would provide a backdoor for any entity who is able to compromise the Signal developers.

With these concerns in mind, it’s worth asking how realistic it is that SGX will meet the high security bar it needs to make this system work.

So how has SGX done so far?

Not well, to be honest. A list of SGX compromises is given on Wikipedia here, but this doesn’t really tell the whole story.

The various attacks against SGX are many and varied, but largely have a common cause: SGX is designed to provide virtualized execution of programs on a complex general-purpose processor, and said processors have a lot of weird and unexplored behavior. If an attacker can get the processor to misbehave, this will in turn undermine the security of SGX.

This leads to attacks such as “Plundervolt“, where malicious software is able to tamper with the voltage level of the processor in real-time, causing faults that leak critical data. It includes attacks that leverage glitches in the way that enclaves are loaded, which can allow an attacker to inject malicious code in place of a proper enclave.

The scariest attacks against SGX rely on “speculative execution” side channels, which can allow an attacker to extract secrets from SGX — up to and including basically all of the working memory used by an enclave. This could allow extraction of values like the seed keys used by Signal’s SVR, or the sealing keys (used to encrypt that data on disk.) Worse, these attacks have not once but twice been successful at extracting cryptographic signing keys used to perform cryptographic attestation. The most recent one was patched just a few weeks ago. These are very much live attacks, and you can bet that more will be forthcoming.

This last part is bad for SVR, because if an attacker can extract even a single copy of one processor’s attestation signing keys, and can compromise a Signal admin’s secrets, they can potentially force Signal to replicate their database onto a simulated SGX enclave that isn’t actually running inside SGX. Once SVR replicated its database to the system, everyone’s secret seed data would be available in plaintext.

But what really scares me is that these attacks I’ve listed above are simply the result of academic exploration of the system. At any given point in the past two years I’ve been able to have a beer with someone like Daniel Genkin of U. Mich or Daniel Gruss of TU Graz, and know that either of these professors (or their teams) is sitting on at least one catastrophic unpatched vulnerability in SGX. These are very smart people. But they are not the only smart people in the world. And there are smart people with more resources out there who would very much like access to backed-up Signal data.

It’s worth pointing out that most of the above attacks are software-only attacks — that is, they assume an attacker who is only able to get logical access to a server. The attacks are so restricted because SGX is not really designed to defend against sophisticated physical attackers, who might attempt to tap the system bus or make direct attempts to unpackage and attach probes to the processor itself. While these attacks are costly and challenging, there are certainly agencies that would have no difficulty executing them.

Finally, I should also mention that the security of the SVR approach assumes Intel is honest. Which, frankly, is probably an assumption we’re already making. So let’s punt on it.

So what’s the big deal?

My major issue with SVR is that it’s something I basically don’t want, and don’t trust. I’m happy with Signal offering it as an option to users, as long as users are allowed to choose not to use it. Unfortunately, up until this week, Signal was not giving users that choice.

More concretely: a few weeks ago Signal began nagging users to create a PIN code. The app itself didn’t really explain well that setting this PIN would start SVR backups. Many people I spoke to said they believed that the PIN was for protecting local storage, or to protect their account from hijacking.

And Signal didn’t just ask for this PIN. It followed a common “dark pattern” born in Silicon Valley of basically forcing users to add the PIN, first by nagging them repeatedly and then ultimately by blocking access to the entire app with a giant modal dialog.

This is bad behavior on its merits, and more critically: it probably doesn’t result in good PIN choices. To make it go away, I chose the simplest PIN that the app would allow me to, which was 9512. I assume many other users simply entered their phone passcodes, which is a nasty security risk all on its own.

Some will say that this is no big deal, since SVR currently protects only users’ contact lists — and those are already stored in cleartext on competing messaging systems. This is, in fact, one of the arguments Moxie has made.

But I don’t buy this. Nobody is going to engineer something as complex as Signal’s SVR just to store contact lists. Once you have a hammer like SVR, you’re going to want to use it to knock down other nails. You’ll find other critical data that users are tired of losing, and you’ll apply SVR to back that data up. Since message content backups are one of the bigger pain points in Signal’s user experience, sooner or later you’ll want to apply SVR to solving that problem too.

In the past, my view was that this would be fine — since Signal would surely give users the ability to opt into or out of message backups. The recent decisions by Signal have shaken my confidence.

Addendum: what does Signal say about this?

Originally this post had a section that summarized a discussion I had with Moxie around this issue. Out of respect for Moxie, I’ve removed some of this at his request because I think it’s more fair to let Moxie address the issue directly without being filtered through me.

So in this rewritten section I simply want to make the point that now (following some discussion on Twitter), there is a workaround to this issue. You can either choose to set a high-entropy passcode such as a BIP39 phrase, and then forget it. This will not screw up your account unless you turn on the “registration lock” feature. Or you can use the new “Disable PIN” advanced feature in Signal’s latest beta, which does essentially the same thing in an automated way. This seems like a good addition, and while I still think there’s a discussion to be had around consent and opt-in, this is a start for now.