81–90 of 395 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember when Microsoft would trash Linux because it was open source and "not secure." Well, this settles it. Using your own hardware and open source software helps but someone determined will still get in...
Even "your own hardware" is going to be pretty damn hard: working with chipmakers to insert back doors So you're going to need to make your own chips, too.
Can someone who actually knows about encryption comment on whether it's actually physically feasible for the NSA to have actually broken, say, SSL 3.0 (which has 128 bits of entropy, IIRC) on a large scale (i.e., when you're sifting through petabytes of data on a daily basis)? And if this were really an issue, couldn't you just use 4096-bit RSA (unless they have managed to surreptitiously insert a backdoor in it)?
SSL relies on a chain of trust, and it's prudent to assume that the NSA has the private keys necessary to produce valid certificates that will be accepted by the certificates that ship with Windows, OS X, Firefox, etc out of the box. So man-in-the-middle attacks are certainly within their capability and fairly hard to detect. As to whether the NSA can passively intercept and decrypt SSL traffic, I don't know, but the…
The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace".
from the Guardian article, also here on HN
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryp...
Wow.... this really puts all the furor over Huawei contracts in the US in context.
Entire crypto schemes, from the RIPEMD hash to the specific parameter generation mechanism in DSA, are premised on the idea that USG-sponsored crypto concepts aren't inherently trustworthy. Similarly, all of Applied Cryptography was premised on the idea that NSA was decades ahead of commercial and academic crypto.
Of the revelations about NSA, this has to be the least revelatory (it's up/down there with the "revelation" that NSA employs teams of people whose job it is to break into Windows computers); it essentially restates something we were already supposed to have taken for granted.
That's not to say this isn't a fascinating story. It is; just keep it in context. Things to remember:
* You really want to know whether NSA is directly attacking cryptographic primitives or whether they're subverting endpoints. I think if you talk to cryptographers, you'll get a slight bias towards the belief that it's the latter: that there are implementation weaknesses at play here more than fundamental breaks in crypto.
* You want to keep in mind that breaks in cryptosystems represent new knowledge, and that the enterprise of breaking cryptosystems is an issue distinct from the public policy concern of where NSA is allowed to deploy those breaks.
* Bear in mind that in the legacy TLS security model, before things like pinning and TACK, NSA would only require a viable attack on a small subset of CAs to gain (along with pervasive network taps) massive capabilities. The payoff for these kinds of capabilities is radically degraded by the anti-surveillance mechanisms of modern browsers like Chrome, which is something you probably want to be thanking people like Adam Langley, Trevor Perrin, and Moxie Marlinspike for pushing so hard to implement.
So does this means they have broken or fund a bug in RSA, fast enough computers to brute force or solved the P versus NP problem. In decreasing chances of possibility. I am also an encryption noob, so I gather that if they have broken a crypto then my 4096 bit files will be no more secure than 1024 bit ones. Right?
RSA has issues but as of yet hasn't yielded entirely to cryptanalysis.
As the article says, it's easier to attack the system and try to get the plaintext, or coerce you into giving up your key through legal means.
Edit: adding a link to Wikipedia's article on post-quantum crypto, it's a good place to start understanding how to answer these type of questions:
"By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors..."
Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware. That's the money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've just put back door…
From the article: "Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read."
Also: “Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” - Snowden
I would assume that because Snowden used Lavabit & they shut down that the NSA took issue with how secure Lavabit actually was.
What's truly frightening is this line from the Guardian's article on the topic: > The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace". What does that even mean? That statement is at the same time paranoid, arrogant, and subtly threatening. It's as if to say that without the ability to decrypt interesting traffic, the NSA would be…
"Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members." Wonder if it is referring to the Dual_EC_DRBG RNG.
If this story leaves you confused, join the club. I don't understand why the NSA was so insistent about including Dual_EC_DRBG in the standard. It makes no sense as a trap door: It's public, and rather obvious. It makes no sense from an engineering perspective: It's too slow for anyone to willingly use it. And it makes no sense from a backwards-compatibility perspective: Swapping one random-number generator for another is easy.