New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
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Re: New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
#2I think observers have long assumed NSA is some number of years ahead – say, 2-30 years ahead – of openly published results in cryptanalysis and cryptosystem vulnerabilities.
Re: New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
#3:( up until just a few years ago, I always looked at the NSA organization with a sense of awe and pride ... that we (the US) were so advanced. Now it's just a source of shame that such powerful knowledge is being directed at us, rather than used as a tool for our benefit.
Re: New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
#4Truth is that we don't know whether they are that good or just a money-eating machine. They are the largest Mathematicians contractor for sure, but that doesn't mean anything if the bureaucracy in between is humongous (as expected in most of these organizations).
Re: New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
#5Compared to the rest of the HN crowd, my knowledge of crypto is very light, so I could be incorrect... But aren't most widely adopted algorithms decently future proof? To where you would sort of have to break math in order for them to be crackable, if used with a very strong password? Sure, flaws were found in RSA, etc. But does something like that have a decent chance of happening again?
Re: New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
#6But information on the NSA's efforts to crack the encrypted portion of that traffic — which would include much of the email bouncing around the net — has remained absent
What Wired.com? Much of the email bouncing around the net and even internal networks, save for traversals like gmail-to-gmail, are NOT a portion of the encrypted traffic. It's important you report this correctly, because "the masses" are otherwise made unaware or unconcerned about the implications. "Oh, I'll just email you my passwords; I heard 'those guys' can read SMS."
Re: New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
#7[deleted]
Re: New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
#8Compared to the rest of the HN crowd, my knowledge of crypto is very light, so I could be incorrect... But aren't most widely adopted algorithms decently future proof? To where you would sort of have to break math in order for them to be crackable, if used with a very strong password? Sure, flaws were found in RSA, etc. But does something like that have a decent chance of happening again?
"Break math" isn't quite right. You'd have to make a major mathematical advance, but there's nothing saying that's impossible.
Re: New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
#9> The Post said it withheld the rest, and kept some information out of its reporting, in consultation with the Obama administration to protect U.S. intelligence sources and methods.
Weird. Why now? They (admin) refused to do that with WikiLeaks.
Re: New Snowden Leak Reports 'Groundbreaking' NSA Crypto-Cracking
#10> The Post's article [1] doesn't detail the "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities" Clapper mentions, and there's no elaboration in the portion of the document published by the paper.
Nothing really new, just a breif line mentioning groundbreaking capabilities with no explanation.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-...