131–140 of 152 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've held the theory that if anybody found something like fast prime factoring or a P = NP proof, they'd get assassinated pretty quickly. It'd be in basically every government's interest to get the knowledge, then make sure nobody else has it.
I’ve had similar thoughts, but walked them back to “oh, they’d probably keep it to themselves or drop it in the NSA’s amnesty box.”
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
I was surprised to see, in the 1999 email you linked, that NSA mass surveillance was already widely known, before the NSA ramp up from 9/11 and before the Snowden disclosures. > Actually, I don't think of the NSA's plots to deny everyone but themselves (and those they dub worthy) access to strong un-GAKed commercial cryptography as a conspiracy, per se. NSA officials acted upon a fairly open if Byzantine strategy. It…
Exactly. But before the Snowden leaks hardly anyone in the mainstream believed or listened to these "conspiracist" hacker/cypherpunk dudes.
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
I was surprised to see, in the 1999 email you linked, that NSA mass surveillance was already widely known, before the NSA ramp up from 9/11 and before the Snowden disclosures. > Actually, I don't think of the NSA's plots to deny everyone but themselves (and those they dub worthy) access to strong un-GAKed commercial cryptography as a conspiracy, per se. NSA officials acted upon a fairly open if Byzantine strategy. It…
Money quotes:
>The government's been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties. They've infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls... Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It's a brave new world out there.
>Fort Meade has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You're talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word "bomb", "president", "Allah", any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.
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…
This is discussed here, at Hacker News. It's also discussed at many other places on the internet. :-)
Why is this chat room you mention relevant? And who are "we" you speak of? You are presenting yourself as some kind of authority, but you need to back that claim up.
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…
? This is discussed here, at Hacker News. It's also discussed at many other places on the internet. :-) Why is this chat room you mention relevant? And who are "we" you speak of? You are presenting yourself as some kind of authority, but you need to back that claim up.
That’s not to be dismissive of their opinion, but I don’t think it’s accurate to call it a claim to authority. It’s the same as saying “a channel on IRC” or “a group on WhatsApp.”
If this did actually "destroy the RSA cryptosystem", seems like a proof of concept would actually be trivial to demonstrate. Given that, my bet is on this (or, rather, at least that particular sentence) being BS.
That's not necessarily the case in general. If you had an algorithm which, given a billion dollars' worth of specialized lattice reduction ASICs, could break 2048-bit RSA in a few months' time, then for all practical purposes this would mean that 2048-bit RSA was broken -- there are plenty of state actors who would drop that kind of money in a heartbeat -- but that doesn't mean that some guy who came up with it would…
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…
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
I was surprised to see, in the 1999 email you linked, that NSA mass surveillance was already widely known, before the NSA ramp up from 9/11 and before the Snowden disclosures. > Actually, I don't think of the NSA's plots to deny everyone but themselves (and those they dub worthy) access to strong un-GAKed commercial cryptography as a conspiracy, per se. NSA officials acted upon a fairly open if Byzantine strategy. It…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Again, no matter how secure you make the cryptography, the weakpoint is the key. Why would someone "tweak" a key, provide it to a "big commercial company" (who for some reason doesn't generate their own key?), instead of just keeping a copy of the key?
To make it look, at least to outsiders (be that users or researchers) like you are providing actually strong crypto. Leaking a key might not be as trivial as some people would imagine, with proper security policies in place.
You are indeed right, in that the key is usually the weak point. But there are several ways in which that can be true, with rather different consequences. If a private key of big company show up in a place where should certainly not be, pandemonium would quickly ensue.
On the other hand, a "tweaked" (intentionally weakened) key is a very different story. It will provide easy plausible deniability. It's also much easier to manage breaking larger collections of such keys (with a similar "flaw") without ever any hard evidence linking such keys together.
Is it really that hard to understand/imagine? (sincere question)