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NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-Breaking Computer

theintercept.com

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Re: NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-Breaking Computer

#61

Post by yeukhon »

schoen wrote: post #45
exhilaration wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is newsworthy: Andrew "Bunnie" Huang: "My guess is this thing, compared to the TOP500 supercomputers at the time (and probably even today) pretty much wipes the floor with them for anything crypto-related." We've always guessed the NSA has some incredible resources, but to get a peek like this into what they had 3 years ago is definitely newsworthy. It makes the whole supercomputing race kind of a joke i…

Apparently the context suggests this particular machine had not been built and delivered at the time the documents were written, so it doesn't show that NSA had this exact machine at that time (though maybe they had other computers that were this fancy or fancier).

Well. WinsorGreen is the successor design of WinsorBlur so I am assuming Blue exists and it's just a matter of time to finish building Green.

Re: NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-Breaking Computer

#62

Post by schoen »

yeukhon wrote: post #61
schoen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the context suggests this particular machine had not been built and delivered at the time the documents were written, so it doesn't show that NSA had this exact machine at that time (though maybe they had other computers that were this fancy or fancier).

Well. WinsorGreen is the successor design of WinsorBlur so I am assuming Blue exists and it's just a matter of time to finish building Green.

I also guess the machine will be built in some form, just that the documents probably don't reflect three-year-old computational capabilities, but might reflect something more like present-day capabilities.

Re: NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-Breaking Computer

#63

Post by [deleted] »

ryao wrote: post #29
mapgrep wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to see you conclude the piece, or that portion, is malpractice :-\ The paragraph you quote was intended to give an overview of one type of work a machine like WindsorGreen might do, in broad terms. While it's true we mention RSA as a very basic example of the sort of thing a government would be /interested/ in breaking, we also specifically quote a security researcher saying WindsorGreen “might also have applic…

Why did you not publish the documents for readers? The story seems pointless without the documents.

[deleted]

Re: NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-Breaking Computer

#64

Post by samfbiddle »

tptacek wrote: post #12

This is malpractice: Widespread modern encryption methods like RSA, named for the initials of the cryptographers who developed it, rely on the use of hugely complex numbers derived from prime numbers. Speaking very roughly, so long as those original prime numbers remain secret, the integrity of the encoded data will remain safe. But were someone able to factor the hugely complex number — a process identical to the so…

I specifically added a paragraph stating, explicitly, that RSA per se is not under threat. Please don't conflate misreading with "malpractice."

Re: NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-Breaking Computer

#65

Post by Nomentatus »

tptacek wrote: post #60
Nomentatus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said, but note that this assumes partial solutions aren't possible, that brute force is the only way in. For example, it assumes that you can't guess a single prime and then successfully test for more uniformity in the resulting (failed) test decryption. Maybe that's a great and true assumption. Maybe it ain't.

The security impact of the relationship between RSA primes is well studied. Also: if you know q and n (which is p * q, and also public)... It's always possible that NSA has new science unknown to the rest of the world. But they've also always been huge consumers of compute hardware, so an attempt to read tea leaves here is pretty much conspiracy-theoretic. If you believe this, there's no reason to believe any (practi…

Proving a negative is awfully hard - well studied doesn't quite cut it. RSA and NSA have a history that precedes the apparent invention, so it's interesting that the tech was allowed to proceed (patents can be seized and kept secret.) I've pointed to an assumption, you've assumed a belief on my part - that's something of a conspiracy theory on your part, it's nothing I've said. The history of cryptography is replete with examples of assumptions of safety that were spectacularly overturned, and that's all I'm pointing to.
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