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“This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

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Re: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

#101

Post by gnatman »

dleslie wrote: post #68
yesenadam wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The paper has the same title as a 2017 draft paper Not quite the same title. He has papers with similar titles since at least 2010. I wanted to say thanks - this document linked to on his wikipedia page was unexpectedly fascinating! NSA, patents, conspiracies.. https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=95280154624588&w=2

Be careful, cypherpunks is a fascinating rabit hole; you can easily fall in and forever alter your perspective.

There’s a ton of material on that site- any other lists you can recommended exploring?

Re: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

#102

Post by erincandescent »

elmo2you wrote: post #96
jfrunyon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would someone backdoor their own key when they could instead just mirror the data or something? Yes, the person you are encrypting something towards is responsible for ensuring that encryption is secure. No matter how secure you make the cryptography, the other party could still just leak the key...

> Why would someone backdoor their own key when they could instead just mirror the data or something? Ever thought about .. let say big commercial companies (e.g. social media platforms), using keys that are either knowingly or unknowingly tweaked? A backdoor might not be trivially simple (one of the primes being fixes), but e.g. one prime be somehow part of any collection that is smaller than the pool of truly rando…

> That's a whole different topic and not what I was pointing at.

No, fundamentally it is

If I'm Evil Social Media Company and I want to leak your secrets to someone (the NSA, KGB, whatever), I could

1. Send your plaintext to them (easy)

2. Send them the private key (arguably even easier - I don't have to mirror the traffic, and only my key security officers need to be aware of the fact that we are doing this)

3. Figure out some complex method to make a backdoored key which is backdoored in a way that _only they_ can exploit.

You'll pick 1 or 2 every time.

Fundamentally, you trust the owner(s) of the private key with your data, since they can just decrypt it and share it and preventing them from dooming you with "weak keys" is more about protecting them from themselves (i.e. accidentally generating weak keys) than anything else

Re: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

#104

Post by brokenmachine »

elmo2you wrote: post #96
jfrunyon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would someone backdoor their own key when they could instead just mirror the data or something? Yes, the person you are encrypting something towards is responsible for ensuring that encryption is secure. No matter how secure you make the cryptography, the other party could still just leak the key...

> Why would someone backdoor their own key when they could instead just mirror the data or something? Ever thought about .. let say big commercial companies (e.g. social media platforms), using keys that are either knowingly or unknowingly tweaked? A backdoor might not be trivially simple (one of the primes being fixes), but e.g. one prime be somehow part of any collection that is smaller than the pool of truly rando…

Is there an alternative public key cryptography scheme where you can be sure that there's only a single private key?

Re: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

#105

Post by dleslie »

gnatman wrote: post #101
dleslie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful, cypherpunks is a fascinating rabit hole; you can easily fall in and forever alter your perspective.

There’s a ton of material on that site- any other lists you can recommended exploring?

You could do worse than reading the book, which is an interview with some key players:

https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/

Or this:

https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/getting-started/what-is-the-cyphe...

Re: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

#106

Post by 7800 »

hyper_reality wrote: post #77

This is being discussed in CryptoHack Discord. We are struggling to understand the paper, it is written in a very dense style and the difficulty is compounded by the fact that lattice problems can be a challenging topic even for cryptographers. Either way, we think that the title "this destroys the RSA cryptosystem" is sensationalistic and probably incorrect. It is presumably based on the fact that the paper claims t…

It actually states, “This destroyes the RSA cryptosystem.”

Seems a bit like the way an old pirate might speak, or at least someone hundreds of years old.

Re: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

#107

Post by yesenadam »

dleslie wrote: post #105
gnatman wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a ton of material on that site- any other lists you can recommended exploring?

You could do worse than reading the book, which is an interview with some key players: https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/ Or this: https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/getting-started/what-is-the-cyphe...

Thanks, looks great. It's by Julian Assange and a few others. First words of the book:

"What is a Cypherpunk?

Cypherpunks advocate for the use of cryptography and similar methods as ways to achieve societal and political change. Founded in the early 1990s, the movement has been most active during the 1990s “cryptowars” and following the 2011 internet spring. The term cypherpunk, derived from (cryptographic) cipher and punk, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006"

So I thought, hmm that sounds like the crypto-anarchy that was discussed on HN the other day. And your 2nd link has a page on that[1]. Indeed they sound like the same idea – one is the people, the other is the system they want. Cyber-equality. Defined, rather, by the system they don't want: the powerful able to read the communications of the less powerful, but not vice versa.

Is there anyone (openly) arguing this would be a bad thing? (Also I'm wondering why I've heard about bitcoin/blockchain a million times but didn't even know what these words meant!)

[1] https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/getting-started/what-is-a-cypherp...

Re: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

#108

Post by balupton »

hyper_reality wrote: post #77

This is being discussed in CryptoHack Discord. We are struggling to understand the paper, it is written in a very dense style and the difficulty is compounded by the fact that lattice problems can be a challenging topic even for cryptographers. Either way, we think that the title "this destroys the RSA cryptosystem" is sensationalistic and probably incorrect. It is presumably based on the fact that the paper claims t…

CryptoHack discord invite: https://discord.com/invite/eJaJ3xC

Re: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

#109

Post by schoen »

_dps wrote: post #94
smolder wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the case it's funny to think... NSA could have sat on this for years. Though that would be a really hard secret to keep.

There's a very amusing epilogue in Steven Levy's "Crypto" [0] about the fact that either RSA or Diffie-Hellman (I've forgotten which) was in fact known to the intelligence services for 10+ years prior to its re-discovery among public researchers. These are people who are very good at keeping secrets. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Classi...

Both, but neither for as long a period of time beforehand as you remember.

Re: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”

#110

Post by dleslie »

yesenadam wrote: post #107
dleslie wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do worse than reading the book, which is an interview with some key players: https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/ Or this: https://cryptoanarchy.wiki/getting-started/what-is-the-cyphe...

Thanks, looks great. It's by Julian Assange and a few others. First words of the book: "What is a Cypherpunk? Cypherpunks advocate for the use of cryptography and similar methods as ways to achieve societal and political change. Founded in the early 1990s, the movement has been most active during the 1990s “cryptowars” and following the 2011 internet spring. The term cypherpunk, derived from (cryptographic) cipher an…

The American and Australian governments have both advocated strongly, recently, for the ability of law enforcement to decrypt civilian communications. Of course, there's plenty of other countries that would desire this imbalance of power, as well.

Examples:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/10/12/us-government-ca...

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/21/805032627/trump-administratio...

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