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PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

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Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#171

Post by VladRussian2 »

ewbuoi wrote: post #130
VladRussian2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the issue is with HTTPS. To read that traffic NSA collects private keys from limited number of [big] companies as collecting them from all companies would be a very public affair. Thus from NSA's price/performance point of view smaller enterprises may be still be off the hook (for now).

They could get a valid key pair from a CA and MITM the connection. It could be detected if the user knows what the public key should be and compares it with what they received, but that seems pretty unlikely.

>It could be detected if the user knows what the public key should be and compares it with what they received, but that seems pretty unlikely.

there is no need to know what the public key should be - only that there are several [more than expected] different keys. Any distributed organization (including Google itself who can be fully expected to monitor which certs their users receive especially after Iran/Diginotar story) could notice it and thus identify the MITM. Thus Google must be on it. Thus no need to involve extra certs from CA though of course i'm not arguing NSA's ability to do that.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#172

Post by diminoten »

smaili wrote: post #95
diminoten wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler alert: They can't decrypt it. That's why they have to ask these companies for the info, rather than just take it from the ISPs.

Doesn't necessarily mean they don't have the ability to decrypt, it just means that they have a process in place so in case shit ever hit the fan (like it just did) they can come back and say "what's the big deal? we have a process in place"

Okay, tinfoil.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#173

Post by newman314 »

leoc wrote: post #163
krek wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember which interview it was, if on Democracy Now, or his MIT lecture video, but Bill Binney stated that the NSA in fact does decrypt HTTPS.

If Bill Binney said that, and if he is right, I'd assume the most likely explanation is that NSA can push over some low-security SSL connections of the type jerf describes above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877362 , but has to rely on "direct access" to get around most or all high-quality (but still widely-used) SSL encryption. (Or, again, that it also has the capacity to break high-grade HTTPS connections,…

If a CA is compromised, then it's just open sesame. So....

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#174

Post by stephen_g »

newman314 wrote: post #173
leoc wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Bill Binney said that, and if he is right, I'd assume the most likely explanation is that NSA can push over some low-security SSL connections of the type jerf describes above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877362 , but has to rely on "direct access" to get around most or all high-quality (but still widely-used) SSL encryption. (Or, again, that it also has the capacity to break high-grade HTTPS connections,…

If a CA is compromised, then it's just open sesame. So....

This has been talked about many times now. All compromising a CA lets them do is to create believable certificates to be able to man in the middle connections, but they can't be doing that for a large number of connections because it's resource intensive and detectable.

They still don't have the private keys of the sites if they break into the CA.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#175

Post by bigiain »

SilasX wrote: post #160
bigiain wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's the problem. Email needs to be able to be read by the recipient, so until a significant portion of email recipients can handle encrypted mail - the NSA doesn't need to attack my encrypted email storage, because enough of my correspondence ends up in cleartext in gmail/hotmail/yahoo et al. This is a hard one to solve. GPGmail seems to get broken with every Mac Mail.app release. Vast numbers of people rely o…

Hm, should be easy enough to have some browser plugin that lets you select a text/data field and recipient list field and encrypt it with the appropriate key; and to do something similar for recognition and decryption of fields. If I implement this, will I become famous?

If you get it right you will.

I think there are complications though - you need to be very sure that rogue javascript can't dig around in your plugin and extract my private key. I'm not sure how securely sandboxed plugins can be.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#176

Post by Sami_Lehtinen »

icebraining wrote: post #139
jerf wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How much are you willing to bet they can't decrypt https?" I'd bet quite a bit, though not "my life", that they do not have a generalized "read everything" ability for all forms of SSL. They may have what cryptographers would call "a crack", but that's a low bar, and doesn't prove they have a practical attack. However, DDG is currently using 128-bit RC4, which is very weak. [1] I wouldn't care to bet anything that t…

OTOH, if they can get a CA - any CA - to cooperate, they can MITM anyone without having to break SSL.

This is why I tell people that actual fingerprint check is much better than any CA.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#177

Post by krek »

stephen_g wrote: post #174
newman314 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a CA is compromised, then it's just open sesame. So....

This has been talked about many times now. All compromising a CA lets them do is to create believable certificates to be able to man in the middle connections, but they can't be doing that for a large number of connections because it's resource intensive and detectable. They still don't have the private keys of the sites if they break into the CA.

What are the odds that Google, Yahoo, et al. handed over their private keys, I wonder.

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#178

Post by lessnonymous »

icebraining wrote: post #139
jerf wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How much are you willing to bet they can't decrypt https?" I'd bet quite a bit, though not "my life", that they do not have a generalized "read everything" ability for all forms of SSL. They may have what cryptographers would call "a crack", but that's a low bar, and doesn't prove they have a practical attack. However, DDG is currently using 128-bit RC4, which is very weak. [1] I wouldn't care to bet anything that t…

OTOH, if they can get a CA - any CA - to cooperate, they can MITM anyone without having to break SSL.

Do they need to MITM? If they have a copy of the private key, can't they just use it to decrypt the data .. even old data for which they've only just acquired the key?

Re: PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

#179

Post by soitgoes »

lessnonymous wrote: post #178
icebraining wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, if they can get a CA - any CA - to cooperate, they can MITM anyone without having to break SSL.

Do they need to MITM? If they have a copy of the private key, can't they just use it to decrypt the data .. even old data for which they've only just acquired the key?

Having the root CA's private key doesn't give them access to the end entity's private keys. When you ask a CA for a cert, you only provide them with your public key (in the form of a CSR) for them to sign. The CSR does not contain the private key.
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