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NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

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Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#61

Post by Xcelerate »

mey wrote: post #52
Xcelerate wrote: post #21

I have a question that perhaps a cryptography expert could answer for me. My father told me when he was young, he visited Oak Ridge National Labs on a trip, and while there, they told him they had satellites that could read the print on a newspaper. At the time, it wasn't classified information; it was just something that nobody knew. Approximately 15-20 years later, satellites with that capability became well-known.…

Assume that over some time frame a crypto solution (the entire system matters as it's very easy to use encryption insecurely) will be compromised. You are essentially buying yourself time. So the question is how much time do you need to buy yourself. Ok, so even if you select a key length of something very large which depends not only on bytes of the key but also the encryption algorithm as well. For a 4096 bit key t…

I'm not sure you saw the last part of my post :) I mentioned the same thing about brute-forcing and focused on the mathematical weaknesses aspect of it. I have written some ECDSA code myself from scratch so I am familiar at least with the very basics of it.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#62

Post by dllthomas »

nathan_long wrote: post #16
baltcode wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's stored client-side, and as a back up on the central server, with a passphrase that is the users responsibility.

>> with a passphrase that is the users responsibility. And there's the rub. "What do you mean, I can't ever see my data again? Why can't you reset my password?" We know that true security means only the user has the key. But users don't all want that responsibility.

Key escrow services?

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#63

Post by david_shaw »

tedks wrote: post #56
david_shaw wrote: post #25

> NSA-proof encryption exists. Yup. Except it's not that easy. Let's say that you're using OTR to provide very strong end-to-end encryption for a conversation between yourself and a buddy, Bob. Maybe he's in a hostile area, and you're worried that if his government sniffs his traffic, that he could be executed for speaking to Americans. Data in transit that is intercepted, if configured correctly, is almost certainly…

Remember that post a little while ago about how most logical fallacies aren't actually logical fallacies? Here, you are committing an actual logical fallacy. It's called "shifting the goalposts." The article is in response to a dragnet surveillance program, where everyone's communications are watched and presumably datamined. It's very easy to do this, because nothing is encrypted, and everyone uses services that exp…

I absolutely agree with you, but I was addressing the potentially misleading title of the article, not the current dragnet observation (which is why I quoted the title of the article). Many people that may not be experienced in cryptography may think that these techniques would protect them from law enforcement, or that their encryption would actually be "NSA proof."

Your description of secure communication (Tor, anonymous XMPP, etc.) is totally accurate and a great explanation for those who may not be quite as familiar with security and OPSEC.

Unfortunately, with great enough amounts of metadata and computing power, this could theoretically be correlated as well. DNS requests or Tor connections correlated with encrypted messages timed between two individuals seems like it would be too hard to make meaningful, but it's not impossible. There's precedence for this when the FBI suspected Jeremy Hammond of being a certain identity on IRC, and correlated his sign-ons with connections to Tor.

You're absolutely, 100% correct, though, that this data (even correlated), must be part of some sort of targeted surveillance. I wasn't trying to counter the dragnet argument as much as provide clarity on what these security measures would or would not do.

Thanks for providing even more clarity in the areas I didn't address :)

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#64

Post by sweis »

ohazi wrote: post #45
rollo_tommasi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not simply make the cryptographically secure service opt-in?

This is the real reason why cryptography hasn't caught on. It's opt-in by nature - No matter how hard you try, you can't send someone an encrypted message if they don't have a public key for you to use.

Actually, yes you can. Check out identity-based encryption and Voltage Security. It's currently in use by Wells Fargo, ADP, and other large enterprise customers.

The catch there is that IBE requires a centralized, trusted key-issuing service where you need to enroll to receive your message. If that's compromised, then game over.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#65

Post by megablast »

Xcelerate wrote: post #21

I have a question that perhaps a cryptography expert could answer for me. My father told me when he was young, he visited Oak Ridge National Labs on a trip, and while there, they told him they had satellites that could read the print on a newspaper. At the time, it wasn't classified information; it was just something that nobody knew. Approximately 15-20 years later, satellites with that capability became well-known.…

> My father told me when he was young, he visited Oak Ridge National Labs on a trip, and while there, they told him they had satellites that could read the print on a newspaper.

It might be easy to find out. Just check when the NSA cancelled their newspaper subscriptions.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#66

Post by Balgair »

I just posted this question the other day.

Let me explain some of my travails trying to use PGP with Thunderbird:

The install of T-Bird wasn't too bad

The install of OpenPGP was not easy but I managed it. The instructions on the site were not all that clear and for an out-of-date version, but YouTube helped out a lot. My mom, the business owners, or a computer science teacher at Central High School simply do not have time to do this. This could be streamlined.

The making of keys and storing of data was totally obtuse, fortunately, the wizard guided me through a lot of it. This could be streamlined.

Now sending a message is where it gets tough. OpenPGP says that I have to use [shift]+"left-click" on the Write button in T-bird to make sure the html won't be used so the PGP message will de-crypted correctly. This is non-sense. Why is this happening?

Ok now assuming I have a plain text email I have to hit [ctrl]+[shift]+[s] and [ctrl]+[shift]+[e] to sign and encrypt. BS. This needs to be better. Just a pop-up and type in the pass-phrase (brilliant wording, btw, phrase makes this so clear it has to be many words long my mom can understand this).

Ok now my buddy can't read it because I did not send him a public key? What the hell are those? Why do I care? I thought I put in my pass-phrase? Didn't he? What is going on?

I sort this out, I find the public key and send it over. Now he can read it. But wait I have another buddy that I have to do this with. Where were those options in the menus again?

There needs to be a button that remembers if I sent the public key to them, sends it if I did not, and then automatically tells their email client that I don't have theirs and gets theirs with permission from them.

Awww, fuck it... the NSA can probably crack this anyway.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#67

Post by mey »

Xcelerate wrote: post #61
mey wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume that over some time frame a crypto solution (the entire system matters as it's very easy to use encryption insecurely) will be compromised. You are essentially buying yourself time. So the question is how much time do you need to buy yourself. Ok, so even if you select a key length of something very large which depends not only on bytes of the key but also the encryption algorithm as well. For a 4096 bit key t…

I'm not sure you saw the last part of my post :) I mentioned the same thing about brute-forcing and focused on the mathematical weaknesses aspect of it. I have written some ECDSA code myself from scratch so I am familiar at least with the very basics of it.

Yeah I think I started writing before I really got your question, my apologies :)

It is very possible that government based research on crypto cracking is several years ahead of the rest of the world, but the attitude to these systems around the time of the dot com bubble was switching from security through obscurity to working in the open. The reason is the research cuts both ways, the US relies on AES as much as you or I. If there is a problem with it, they would be burned as well.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#68

Post by jessaustin »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #58
david_shaw wrote: post #25

> NSA-proof encryption exists. Yup. Except it's not that easy. Let's say that you're using OTR to provide very strong end-to-end encryption for a conversation between yourself and a buddy, Bob. Maybe he's in a hostile area, and you're worried that if his government sniffs his traffic, that he could be executed for speaking to Americans. Data in transit that is intercepted, if configured correctly, is almost certainly…

Doesn't truecrypt use PBKDF2 or similar? In which case (assuming a good password) it would still be uncrackable in any practical sense. Besides , in such an example the government would have to be suspecting bob already on some other grounds. In the case of a despotic regime they probably already have him in prison.

It does use PBKDF2, and the input to that is not just a passphrase but also one or more keyfiles, a salt, and some other metadata. My understanding is that the keyfiles should supply most of the randomness.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#69

Post by jiggy2011 »

bdamm wrote: post #13

Intelligence-community-proof is somewhat of a fallacy. You can make it more expensive for the NSA to get your email, because then you're forcing them (or another arm of the government) to penetrate your client and extract the key there. And, all you have done is make damn sure they keep your metadata records. Somewhere I read that sending encrypted email is an automatic flag, in the same category as using words that…

That sounds unlikely, encrypted email is relatively common in business. For example many domain registrars used it as a mechanism for changing domain settings before "APIs" were a thing.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#70

Post by zobzu »

Its not about convenience. its about money. Like everything really.

Using GPG/PGP for example (which IMO is the best solution) is nice. It has a good, convenient design. The clients, UI, etc are terrible. Theyre extremely inconvenient. That can be fixed. This needs some time and a little dedication. Nobody will pay for a product that has proper, easy, fast PGP support across the board. Nobody. Since it's not a trivial task, and the benefits are "only" privacy, it didn't happen yet. If anything, people re-code their own, incompatible and generally lesser version of PGP, because they will get financial gain, or popularity from it (patching GPG doesn't give you as much popularity as making your own, you see.. and we're quite ego-driven / NIH-happy)

So, here we are. And I'm to blame too, I haven't worked on this either. I'm secretly hoping things like PRISM will actually help making this move forward.

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