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The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

economist.com

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Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#81

Post by natrius »

engrenage wrote: post #75
natrius wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American government is collecting as much data about as many humans as it can, which I find morally repugnant. I support efforts to make that more difficult, even if it weakens the American government.

Government strength is relative. Weakening the American government is equivalent to strengthening other Governments. Would you mind telling us which ones you prefer and why they are morally superior?

Several wise men have pointed out the potential foolishness of trading liberty for the pursuit of security. It's not that other countries are morally superior. It's that the government is committing morally dubious acts in my name, and I object.

Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#82

Post by lifeisstillgood »

derefr wrote: post #5

One of the "nice" things about the NSA: they rely on pretty standard crypto--the same kind the rest of us do!--for their less sensitive, but still classified, secrets. NSA Ciphersuite B ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_B_Cryptography ) is built into a lot of gov/mil communications technology. And it's just RSA, ECDHE, and so on--all that same stuff available in TLS. In other words: if the NSA break one of t…

This depends - in reality all governments are going to be forced to realise what they used to think was security has all along simply been privacy - anyone who could tell what they were upto was too polite / disinterested to do so. He guy with the cottage across from XXX research centre does not care about the tail numbers of the planes landing at night.

But now every plane spotter has instant cross-correlation with every other one - and those secret flights stand out as being, well, private flights.

So long story short, if I did magically invent quantum computing, I would let the rest of the low grade secrets go hang. One of the 3 million (!) security cleared US personnel will throw Assange a copy soon enough - so lets use the advantage, to our advantage.

This of course means that if our security services have the brains and the political muscle, they will need to choose themselves which are the truly secret things and arrange a government in a government to keep it in shape. That's not likely to be a good thing.

Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#83

Post by lifeisstillgood »

advice4u wrote: post #65
dasil003 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show some gratitude. You have no idea how many individuals had to sacrifice their personal lives to get that picture into the commons.

What do you mean? As far as I can tell, it is freely available on NSA's website: http://www.nsa.gov/about/_images/pg_hi_res/nsa_aerial.jpg

Perhaps it would sound better as "Many Bantha spies have given their lives to bring us that photo, General Calrissian"

(I'm sure I have that wrong - so a prize to whoever corrects the quote from memory :-)

Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#84

Post by yk »

cschmidt wrote: post #80
yk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it would be a very well guarded secret. But even then the question is how public key crypto is broken. If they can easily generate exploits for implementations, because they know a essential implementation detail everybody else is missing, then it would be fundamentally different from being able to break RSA directly, or if they have a constructive prove of P=NP.

Remember that factoring primes isn't know to be NP Hard. There is no complexity breakthrough required, we just don't know how to do it quickly. So we don't get P=NP from any factoring breakthrough.

Depends on the breakthrough, we know that multiplication is in P and therefore factorization in NP. So a P?=NP breakthrough may or may not have consequences for integer factorization. ( Actually since I did write that, I wonder if P=NP would invalidate any public key crypto, since efficient encryption should be in P.)

Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#85

Post by lifeisstillgood »

dasil003 wrote: post #79
advice4u wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? As far as I can tell, it is freely available on NSA's website: http://www.nsa.gov/about/_images/pg_hi_res/nsa_aerial.jpg

It's just a joke, sorry. I'm well aware humor isn't appreciated around here and actually I understand it because humor is a slippery slope ending in reddit-style banal meme-threads, but every once in a while I can't help myself and karma be damned.

Well have a point back, gave me a chuckle. Been a long day so it was not a high bar ;-)

Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#86

Post by tanzam75 »

devx wrote: post #29
seiji wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most advanced math a quantum computer has done to date is "factored 21 into 3×7, with high probability (Martín-López et al. 2012)." Remember: companies are in the game of marketing hype to ride your scifi hopes and dreams. When you see a company saying "quantum" anything, discount their unqualified claims greatly. (Investors are not immune to being manipulated by hype. Claiming "they must be good because they hav…

I think that's for "normal" quantum computers. D-wave is a different kind of quantum computer.

The D-Wave machine is not a general quantum computer.

For example, the quantum computer that factored 21 into 3 x 7 did it by using Shor's algorithm for quantum factoring in polynomial time. The D-Wave machine cannot implement Shor's algorithm.

The D-Wave machine would be more capable on a different problem, one that maps efficiently onto the D-Wave machine's problem space. But we're talking about factoring here.

Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#87

Post by junto »

twotwotwo wrote: post #47
kcorbitt wrote: post #9

Breaking public-key crypto would have to be the biggest coup in SIGINT in the history of ever . Much bigger than cracking the Enigma. Just thinking about the sheer volume of internet traffic at every level and in every country that relies on the security of encryption makes the possibility of it being fundamentally broken a literal nightmare. I don't think it has happened. But if it had , that would be the kind of se…

Breaking RSA keys up to 1024 bits is one less-outlandish-than-some possibility. NSA published a note advocating use of ECC in 2009: http://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/elliptic_curve.shtml NSA's statement wasn't "we've got an RSA-breaking machine" or anything like that; the highlights are 0) folks are using RSA-1024, which public sources only ascribe 80 bits' worth of security to, smaller than the usual margin; 1) R…

The Snowden comment about VPN startups has intrigued me for a while. My theory is that the NSA have filter boxes placed at the exit points of these VPNs. They sit and wait to see what pops out (at the VPN unencrypted endpoint) and then vacuum it all up. Most VPN endpoints are at major networking points. I.e London, New York, Frankfurt, etc.

It is then a simple matter of waiting for a user to leak personable identifiable information. A visit to Facebook or an email account, etc whilst connected to the VPN is all it takes, and then you can group and map browser headers (roughly) to VPN users.

Maybe they can break small key length SSL when they really need to. If there is TLS traffic of interest popping out from the VPN exit, then they store it and process it later, probably in some massive AWS compute intensive cloud service even.

VPN users have to remember that their traffic is protected from your machine as far as the VPN exit node. After that exit point onwards to the requested web server, you are as naked as before. Worse is that it lulls users into a false sense of security.

Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#88

Post by Plasmoid »

regularfry wrote: post #43
gnaffle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, as a corrolary of this, you presently won't have much to fear if this break has happened, simply because the NSA would only use it _very_ sparingly, like how the allies used the Enigma break during WW2. Of course, if the cat ever gets out of the bag, that situation would change.

Carrying on from that thought, the various mathematician-employing agencies have now had over 60 years to study the problem of "how much can we use this critical information-revealing tool without exposing its existence?" If they can identify an upper bound on "sparingly", that's immensely valuable.

During WW2, the Allies would crack messages to locate submarines.

Now killing a submarine once you know where it is, is pretty easy. The problem is finding the submarine, and explaining how you were found. To handle that, the Allies used a form of parallel construction. They would send a spotting plane over the area, to spot the sub and give a plausible reason to have located the submarine.

Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#89

Post by regularfry »

Plasmoid wrote: post #88
regularfry wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carrying on from that thought, the various mathematician-employing agencies have now had over 60 years to study the problem of "how much can we use this critical information-revealing tool without exposing its existence?" If they can identify an upper bound on "sparingly", that's immensely valuable.

During WW2, the Allies would crack messages to locate submarines. Now killing a submarine once you know where it is, is pretty easy. The problem is finding the submarine, and explaining how you were found. To handle that, the Allies used a form of parallel construction. They would send a spotting plane over the area, to spot the sub and give a plausible reason to have located the submarine.

That just moves the problem. Now the Germans start wondering how the spotting planes seem to be so damn good at being in the right place at the right time.

Re: The NSA's crypto "breakthrough"

#90

Post by engrenage »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #78
engrenage wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government strength is relative. Weakening the American government is equivalent to strengthening other Governments. Would you mind telling us which ones you prefer and why they are morally superior?

Weakening the American government is equivalent to strengthening other Governments. No, building petabyte-scale data centers to spy on you and me is what's weakening the American government. We're not the problem, right? The NSA is like the drunk who looks for his lost keys under the lamppost, "because that's where the light is." Not only does the American government's idea of a hypersecure state not make us any more…

The lack of evidence isn't surprising given that they are a spy agency. They may not be protecting the US from terrorism, but there are major geopolitical adversaries at work who have no scruples about using cyberwarfare techniques. There is something akin to the Cold War in play, and the NSA is a significant part of the US's position in that war.
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