Isn't the NSA breaking US law by hacking into a commercial entity's network?
The NSA is freely admitting to direct domestic mass surveillance at its website which details the extent of the domestic spying, the search, seizure, and indefinite storage of ALL citizen electronic data. The fact that there is no discussion or disagreement of this in the US media and amoung US Citizens is tacit approval given the transparency shown by the NSA Domestic Surveillance Website: http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-…
The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
191–200 of 200 posts
Re: The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
#192Re: The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand why that might make you uncomfortable, and I do hesitate to make such comparisons. But, you know who cringes when they hear about the surveillance apparatus that we are building in the Five Eyes countries? Germans.
Yes, this is a valid and timely point. On a side note, I hope that the companies and corporations that will come out of the startup scene in Germany can help to counterbalance the over reaching. There is certainly demand for progress in the direction of personal privacy, and Germany seems well suited to spearhead that movement.
Re: The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only in a limited way though, the NSA can decide (or at least exert considerable influence over) what's legal in the US - but criminal actions in, say, The Netherlands or any other (non five eyes) country, cannot be "justified" or "excused" legally by another except those countries. I guess a _lot_ of what goes in in state sponsored espionage happens outside the civilian legal system - at least in "major" countries -…
But how do you identify an anonymous NSA hacker?
Re: The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't those even easier to wiretap? I believe (maybe I'm wrong here) that the word wiretap comes precisely because people could literally "tap" into the wire and listen everything. Or did I miss the sarcasm?
The old technologies required more effort (somebody had to go physically tap the wire).
With SS7, widely deployed in Europe and then the rest of the world, probing (tapping) was quite straight forward when the SP complied with local lawful intercept regulations.
Re: The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
#196Personally, my biggest takeaway is that anything centralized is compromised, period. Any centralized system is such a juicy target that the NSA will compromise it. The only way to avoid dragnet issues is to decentralize and force the NSA to expend resources at the edges. This doesn't means that you can make an individual target secure. The NSA can always outspend you. But you can prevent the NSA from easily just vacu…
Agreed. I still wait to learn that AWS is compromised on a huge scale too. No words yet - mark this post and let's see and wait.
Re: The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
#197How many silicon valley patriots would support this outrageous attack? It was one week ago that Obama was arguing that this kind of activity is necessary. http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/stanford-obama-ti... This is not a republican/democrat problem. This is an institutional problem. We need comprehensive reform of both parties and it should be followed by a purging of the existing federal machine.
Re: The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
#198Personally, the biggest take away to this is the invasive targeting of completely innocent and ordinary people simply as a means to get access to things the NSA needed (sim Card keys). We have concrete evidence they nailed peoples personal email accounts and social networks merely as a means to an get crypto keys in mass. Sure, the potential mass surveillance is exceedingly problematic, but thats mainly problematic b…
Indeed, It is gradually recursing backward to "invasive targeting of completely innocent and ordinary people simply as a means to get access more innocent and ordinary people in order to ...etc"
Alternate version: If you aren't three or fewer connections away from anyone with something to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Re: The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not concerned about that. It is bad practice to damage security for all because of few. This is all I am saying. It seems like a pretty bad idea to me.
Damage security? They didn't damage the security of the products because of this, if anything you should take of is just how easily these products can be compromised in such manner. All the NSA did is to steal keys which they can then use to interdict cellular communications, it's not like they put in a weakness by design and then exploited it (which they might have done in other operations but that's a completely di…
Actually there were certain projects got pushed back like the IDEA from ETH Zurich or ECC from University of Washington and other potentially vulnerable alternatives were promoted. ECC btw. is pretty strong for a very long time, even today, if you don't use the backdoored version...
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-90A/SP800-90A...
Re: The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damage security? They didn't damage the security of the products because of this, if anything you should take of is just how easily these products can be compromised in such manner. All the NSA did is to steal keys which they can then use to interdict cellular communications, it's not like they put in a weakness by design and then exploited it (which they might have done in other operations but that's a completely di…
Everything can be compromised. It is just a matter of enough resources(money really). Finding a security bug and actively using it and do not expose it publicly is kind of damaging security because the bug can be used by other organizations as well. Writing Stuxnet is an entire different level. Actively deploying backdoors and compromise entire networks just to get to the target is a lot of collateral damage. Isn't i…
I also hope that you don't insinuate that ECC was "invented" by UW since elliptic curve cryptography was known for quite a long time.
By the backdoor I assume you mean the whole NIST curves fiasco, well besides the fact that it was in use almost no where, if you speak to actual mathematicians you'll find out that it wasn't a big deal. The NIST curve was more about performance enchantment than backdooring, altough sadly for NIST and for the NSA it failed at providing both.
The big problems with ECC is that it's extremely susceptible to side channel attacks especially in embedded implementations, and that if you have the capability to use quantum computing for cryptanalysis then to break ECC you'll need only about 25-50% of the compute time/power than you would need to break RSA.
Also since ECC is asymmetric and quite resource consuming it's not really used in encryption as much as you think, sure it's good in any situation where you can use PKI but PKI is rarely used to encrypt actual data. The common uses of PKI are for authentication and initial key exchange data encryption whether it's in rest or in motion is usually based on symmetric encryption.