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How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

schneier.com

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Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#31

Post by hackula1 »

danso wrote: post #2

Politics and civil freedoms aside, I think it's fascinating that there can essentially be this black box, i.e. the NSA, that can make breakthroughs in new mathematics with only its employees and those on the outside sworn to secrecy. They obviously have brilliant mathematicians, but more brilliant than the best ones at the world's best universities or tech companies? Or are their suspected/hypothetical theoretical br…

You can crack into any system with 30 billion dollars at your disposal. People are always the weak link. Most of the revelations of late suggest a "paid backdoor" rather than a mathematical backdoor or a technical backdoor. The old adage of "follow the money" probably leads to many backdoors here that were paid for with cold hard cash.

Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#32

Post by nitrogen »

vinceguidry wrote: post #22
lesterbuck wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be recognized inside the NSA, a large technical population. In addition, as with the CIA and other clandestine US government organizations, they appeal to patriotism and helping the national interest. That appeal seems to be fraying somewhat lately for the NSA.

If they're really trying to keep it secret, not even the NSA rank and file will know. It's all mostly need to know anyway.

Though I have no first-hand knowledge, I was under the impression that organizations like the NSA have internal peer-reviewed journals that their mathematicians can "publish" in, while remaining classified and unavailable to the public.

Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#33

Post by smithzvk »

bascule wrote: post #20

Schneier has been giving some pretty weird advice lately. This is probably the weirdest thing I've seen from him: "Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can." There are plenty of ECC systems that have virtually no chance of NSA influence. Curve25519/Ed25519 come to mind.

I truly don't understand why the suggestion isn't encrypt it both ways (or, more generally, many different, layered encryption schemes).

Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#34

Post by joe_the_user »

newman314 wrote: post #21

What is not being said is "Which if any of the CAs have been compromised?" There is this ongoing conversation of "Use HTTPS" (as one of the defense mechanisms) but there is been very little discussion from what I have seen around the scenario where CAs have been compromised/backdoor'ed.

What is not being said is "Which if any of the CAs have been compromised?"

That was yesterday. It's being said now.

Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#35

Post by eru »

hyperbovine wrote: post #19
ef4 wrote: post #15

We can and we must. I'm glad that Bruce Schneier has now had a chance to view some of the primary source documents from the Snowden leaks, because I trust him to speak frankly and I trust his technical ability. (I'm referring to http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_bre... , not the above link). Both he and Snowden have essentially said that we can still trust the math. Modern symmetric crypto has…

If the NSA had really broken asymmetric crypto it would imply that they were sitting on an huge unpublished result in one or more of a) complexity theory b) quantum computing c) number theory d) ?? something even more outlandish. It's difficult to imagine even them keeping a lid on that. Mathematics is not a large field nor is it by nature a secretive one. (Arguably recognition is the thing driving most mathematician…

Oh, in RSA there are also lots of `weak' numbers that you shouldn't choose. They might have found some attacks against some newly recognized weak numbers.

Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#36

Post by DanielRibeiro »

ef4 wrote: post #15

We can and we must. I'm glad that Bruce Schneier has now had a chance to view some of the primary source documents from the Snowden leaks, because I trust him to speak frankly and I trust his technical ability. (I'm referring to http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_bre... , not the above link). Both he and Snowden have essentially said that we can still trust the math. Modern symmetric crypto has…

Regarding the Quantum Computer hypothesis he brings up: there are crypto algorithms designed to survive attacks from them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

They are a lot more expensive, but if you want to be extra safe, it is good to know that there are alternatives.

Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#37

Post by jarek »

Debugreality wrote: post #25

Here is an interesting startup idea that may be a step towards a solution. Setup an organization that gives a tick of approval similar to ISO quality standards but for NSA Free software. It would involve selling your logo to business that meet a defined list of processes and practices to harden their software against 3rd party spying and security flaws. Then you can preform audits and sell your logo on a yearly basis…

Should go a lot better than for-profit credit-rating agencies, right?

Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#38

Post by bsullivan01 »

zorked wrote: post #7
maxk42 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. One advantage the NSA has is it can pay some of the best mathematicians to be full-time pure mathematicians. There are very few mathematicians that have the opportunity to do something like that -- even professors have to teach a few classes. I imagine it's a powerful draw to top talent and gives them the ability to spend more time on a problem than most others.

On the other hand your work is secret and you will never be recognized for what you do.

Never is a long time, in a decade or two you might be. BUT either way, some very brilliant NSA mathematicians know what you came up with and so do you. That's enough for a lot of people.

Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#39

Post by fivethree »

marshray wrote: post #23
marcosdumay wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, on those feet, I'd ask for money, not knowledge. That has the advantage that the NSA may actually accept the deal, instead of just blackmailing me (or worse). That is, if I wanted to make any kind of deal with the NSA.

Why would you expect a lawless organization like this to actually pay you? It might just be easier for them to say "Thanks, but we already knew that, and by the way that's ultra classified so we'll give you the option of a clean suicide."

Because the "lawless organization" is backed by the richest country in the history of the concept of money.

Re: How Advanced Is the NSA's Cryptanalysis, and Can We Resist It?

#40

Post by mitmatt »

DanielRibeiro wrote: post #36
ef4 wrote: post #15

We can and we must. I'm glad that Bruce Schneier has now had a chance to view some of the primary source documents from the Snowden leaks, because I trust him to speak frankly and I trust his technical ability. (I'm referring to http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_bre... , not the above link). Both he and Snowden have essentially said that we can still trust the math. Modern symmetric crypto has…

Regarding the Quantum Computer hypothesis he brings up: there are crypto algorithms designed to survive attacks from them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography They are a lot more expensive, but if you want to be extra safe, it is good to know that there are alternatives.

To clarify, there are public-key cryptosystems with no known quantum attacks, but it's not known how to build such systems based on problems that are known to be QMA-complete (or NP-complete).

Here's a discussion from Scott Aaronson (which has a corresponding chapter in his new book): http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec8.html

> Currently, our best candidates for such trapdoor OWF's are based on lattice problems, like the Shortest Vector Problem (SVP) that I described earlier. Whereas factoring reduces to the abelian hidden subgroup problem, which is solvable in quantum polynomial time, SVP is only known to reduce to the dihedral hidden subgroup problem, which is not known to be solvable in quantum polynomial time despite a decade of effort.

> Inspired by this observation, and building on earlier work by Ajtai and Dwork, Oded Regev has recently proposed public-key cryptosystems that are provably secure against quantum eavesdroppers, assuming SVP is hard for quantum computers.

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