Hundreds of federal agencies should adopt an encryption tool to protect whistleblowers, veterans suffering from mental health crises and others from hackers who might target them when they reach out via agency websites, Sen. Ron Wyden said Monday.
The Oregon Democrat urged the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Office of Management and Budget to take steps to adopt Encrypted Client Hello — a cybersecurity technology that protects the name of the website visited by a user — in a letter to the two agencies. His office identified at least 350 sites that don’t use its protections.
While almost all federal agency websites are encrypted, standard web encryption doesn’t secure some website names, Wyden said, using reportfraud.ftc.gov as an example.
“As data travels across the internet, hackers and foreign actors monitoring network connections can easily see these exposed website names,” he wrote. “This visibility could lead to malicious eavesdroppers identifying whistleblowers, profiling cleared federal personnel, tracking Americans seeking crisis support, and mapping interactions between agencies.”
Wyden wrote that Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is especially effective with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that connect hundreds of thousands of websites to the internet. For websites delivered by a CDN, ECH makes it so anyone intercepting user web traffic can view the network delivering the content but not the specific site.
Agencies using CDN infrastructure without Encrypted Client Hello include an FBI tipline that supports ECH but doesn’t enable it and a Department of Veteran Affairs online suicide prevention hotline that isn’t protected by ECH because Amazon doesn’t support it, as well as agencies offering things like national security personnel services and whistleblower channels.
Because of the lack of ECH protection, foreign adversaries might be able to identify someone submitting crime tips to the FBI, Wyden warned.
Wyden made two recommendations to the leaders of CISA and the OMB.
“CISA should require that civilian federal agencies enable the protections of ECH across all public-facing websites and inter-agency web systems,” he said. “OMB, in coordination with the Office of the National Cyber Director and CISA, should establish support for ECH protections as a mandatory condition for commercial cloud and network vendors seeking federal contracts.”
CISA and OMB didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter, first reported by NextGov/FCW.
Wyden’s Monday missive is his most recent aimed at improving security technology at federal agencies, following on the heels of a letter in July first reported by CyberScoop that urged feds to get rid of older, insecure, public-facing VPNs.
