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NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

washingtonpost.com

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Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#121

Post by cenhyperion »

anigbrowl wrote: post #28
aasarava wrote: post #3

From the article: "And while most types of software get more user-friendly over time, user-friendly cryptography seems to be intrinsically difficult. Experts are not much closer to solving the problem today than they were two decades ago." I'm not sure I agree that user-friendly cryptography is "intrinsically difficult." It doesn't seem like it would be hard for email clients and even the Gmail frontend to pop up a m…

Not so. Nothing stops Linux distros defaulting to mail and file systems that encrypt everything by default, but the reality is that most people can't be bothred. I certainly can't, and I don't feel like putting myself out to encrypt everything in order to make it popular. As has been pointed out, the metadata of who you email and phone, while not probative in the same fashion as the contents of calls and emails, are…

Exactly, does the NSA really need to know what the contents are of a message to a known political activist to know what you're discussing?

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#122

Post by gwgarry »

david_shaw wrote: post #25

> NSA-proof encryption exists. Yup. Except it's not that easy. Let's say that you're using OTR to provide very strong end-to-end encryption for a conversation between yourself and a buddy, Bob. Maybe he's in a hostile area, and you're worried that if his government sniffs his traffic, that he could be executed for speaking to Americans. Data in transit that is intercepted, if configured correctly, is almost certainly…

These edge cases are stupid. If 99% of Americans are safe, that's good enough. Dudes that actually break the law are not our problem, government should get them. The problem is all the other people who are doing nothing wrong other than have opinions or beliefs that the government does not like. Or in the case now are simply sending e-mails. If we can make it harder to get their shit that's enough.

This whole idea that no we can't do it, is defeatist. We can and we should do it, and then we should do more. As much as we can to make it as hard as possible. And if the government still wants to do shit, then let them. That's their prerogative.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#123

Post by DennisP »

silvestrov wrote: post #50
david_shaw wrote: post #25

> NSA-proof encryption exists. Yup. Except it's not that easy. Let's say that you're using OTR to provide very strong end-to-end encryption for a conversation between yourself and a buddy, Bob. Maybe he's in a hostile area, and you're worried that if his government sniffs his traffic, that he could be executed for speaking to Americans. Data in transit that is intercepted, if configured correctly, is almost certainly…

There's no need to throw him in jail. They can just install a hidden camera and record him typing the password. Next time he's out shopping the "maid" will drop by and the copy the hard drive.

One of the news reports on Snowden said when he logs types his passphrase he drapes a blanket over his head and laptop.

Keyloggers are a problem, so keep the laptop in a nice safe when you're out.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#124

Post by TheCondor »

Balgair wrote: post #66

I just posted this question the other day. Let me explain some of my travails trying to use PGP with Thunderbird: The install of T-Bird wasn't too bad The install of OpenPGP was not easy but I managed it. The instructions on the site were not all that clear and for an out-of-date version, but YouTube helped out a lot. My mom, the business owners, or a computer science teacher at Central High School simply do not have…

Enigmail?

It's a thunderbird plugin and its pretty good

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#125

Post by derleth »

onedognight wrote: post #99
derleth wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perfect Forward Secrecy means that even if you want to you cannot decrypt old messages Which means, if they're jailing you until you do decrypt the messages, you get jailed indefinitely. Contempt of court has very few limits in some circumstances, even compared to being imprisoned after being convicted of a crime: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-3rd-circuit/1262859.html

> Which means, if they're jailing you until you do decrypt the messages, you get jailed indefinitely. Maybe, but they wouldn't be waiting for you to do something for them. They would understand that there was nothing you could do to help them decrypt the messages. i.e. your encryption worked.

> They would understand that there was nothing you could do to help them decrypt the messages.

That's what I'm wondering, though. Would they believe you? Would they believe the documentation?

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#126

Post by akira2501 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #53
Xcelerate wrote: post #21

I have a question that perhaps a cryptography expert could answer for me. My father told me when he was young, he visited Oak Ridge National Labs on a trip, and while there, they told him they had satellites that could read the print on a newspaper. At the time, it wasn't classified information; it was just something that nobody knew. Approximately 15-20 years later, satellites with that capability became well-known.…

> This indicates to me that top secret technology is probably somewhere around 15-20 years ahead of what the general public knows about. Err, maybe in optics at the time, but you can't just generalize like this. You can't consistently be ahead of everything all the time. More than likely the NSA suffers under Moore's law like everyone else.

I wouldn't be that sure. The NSA made DES _more_ secure in the 1970s by influencing IBMs design of the S-Boxes, regular cryptography research didn't even discover this until 1992.

This means that the NSA understood differential cryptanalysis 22 years before non-NSA researchers did. Their ability to brute force is meaningless if they have techniques to obviate it's necessity.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#127

Post by B-Con »

Xcelerate wrote: post #21

I have a question that perhaps a cryptography expert could answer for me. My father told me when he was young, he visited Oak Ridge National Labs on a trip, and while there, they told him they had satellites that could read the print on a newspaper. At the time, it wasn't classified information; it was just something that nobody knew. Approximately 15-20 years later, satellites with that capability became well-known.…

There's a general question among cryptographers: How far ahead of the general public is the NSA?

The answer: We don't know. Interestingly, back in the early 90s they were maybe 15ish years ahead of us. Decisions they made back then weren't understood until the 2000s. However, the gap may have been closed somewhat as of late. The public found flaws in SHA-1 (an algorithm by the NSA) in the 2000s that we believe the NSA didn't actually know about yet.

A general note on cryptography security margins (not really an answer, sorry, just some thoughts): The margins are designed to take into account future advances in technology. The community chooses the problems with the most conservative, best understood parameters, and that seem to be the least-likely to experience a break-through. As well, it tends to pick things with margins like "40+ years", meaning that even if we continue to improve our attacks and computing power at the same rate we have been, it is generally expected that it'll take at least 40 years before we're good enough to break it. (Obviously the experts turn out to be wrong sometimes.)

The community thinks very long term and tries to avoid ever picking anything that is very possible to be broken in just 20 years. It takes (in rough terms) at least 5 just to get through the review process and get the algorithm into standards, another 5 to get it into wide-spread usage, and another 5 to transition away from it. So a very popular crypto algorithm probably needs at least 15 years from its introduction run its life cycle, assuming theres no lull of happiness where it's just existing as a secure, commonly used standard. So there's little point in introducing any algorithm that is anything but a very low likelihood of being broken in 20, because it would spend only a fraction of it's lifespan serving as a widely-used, secure standard.

Last point: Breaks tend to be slow, and big breaks are usually smelled very far in advance. When we're 10 or so years out from a big break, we have a good chance of knowing it and we can start to transition away. Someone 20 years ahead of us may very well only find big breaks just before we start to migrate away from the algorithm.

Due to that, we might optimistically (optimism has no place in crypto, I know ;-)) think that an adversary 20 years ahead of us has relatively minimal advantage.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#128

Post by tomjen3 »

sneak wrote: post #116
tedks wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that post a little while ago about how most logical fallacies aren't actually logical fallacies? Here, you are committing an actual logical fallacy. It's called "shifting the goalposts." The article is in response to a dragnet surveillance program, where everyone's communications are watched and presumably datamined. It's very easy to do this, because nothing is encrypted, and everyone uses services that exp…

> This is not the threat model that we're faced with now. Let's say you and Bob communicate using accounts you've made on random XMPP servers using Tor, and all the messages are encrypted with OTR. Both servers are in the US, and the NSA's metadata database shows E83Gxw@jabber.org sending lots of ciphertext to PAnd9B@jabber.org. Tor won't help at all if all of the long-distance network traffic in the country is being…

Isn't the connections between tor encrypted? If not, that seems like a crazy oversight.

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#129

Post by tomjen3 »

__alexs wrote: post #46
tsahyt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren't there cases of the government forcing people to give them their passphrase in the US already? Somehow I seem to remember something like this very vaguely.

In the UK Oliver Drage (alleged child pornographer) was convicted and jailed for 16 weeks under RIPA for not disclosing his password. http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/10/polic...

Yeah, but the British government is famously orweillian, and 16 weeks is a lot less than he wouldhave gotton for child porn (I hope).

Re: NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

#130

Post by tomjen3 »

y0ghur7_xxx wrote: post #71
maaku wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And where is the private key stored? On Google or Microsoft's server? What then would be the point? (I assume you'll answer that it'll be done client-side, but JavaScript cryptography is a whole mess of fail. But that's a separate issue.)

> And where is the private key stored? Securely in the Browser, and not directly accessible by js, just like a TMP chip or a smartcard. Could that be a solution?

Doesn't most computers have TMP chips, which are perfectly capable of storing and generating private keys so the browser doesn't have acccess to them.
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