Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 395 posts

Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

#121

Post by 16s »

Some organizations have IT security departments that attempt to foil encryption already. They use devices to terminate SSL before it leaves their network and forge certs back to clients and basically act as a MITM for the clients making the TLS/SSL request. They do this to inspect the traffic before it leaves the network.

I predict that in the next 5 to 10 years, many organizations across all industry sectors will drop/reject encrypted packets (SSL, SSH, SFTP, etc) that they cannot decrypt. And the reason they'll give is that it makes them more secure.

The concern I have (as a security technologist) is that most people who use encryption are not bad, however everyone is punished and every packet must now be inspected because a few people use encryption to do bad things. So one day soon, I'm afraid that anyone who uses encryption will be suspect simply because they do and the stronger the encryption, then the more suspect they'll be.

Will it become illegal to do encryption research or use OpenPGP unless you agree to escrow your private key or will everyone be forced to use very weak ciphers? In today's climate (encryption is evil), I see all of these things as very real possibilities.

Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

#122

Post by [deleted] »

jaibot wrote: post #37
cromwellian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't take a 256-bit cryptoalgorithm into a middle school and kill kids with it, so I don't think the analogy works exactly. Maybe if you print it out on paper, or use a floppy disk or CD, you could cut a few people.

Another difference: You don't need a gun to perform the most basic of functions securely. They occupy exactly opposite quadrants on the useful/dangerous axis.

[deleted]

Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

#124

Post by tptacek »

andrewcooke wrote: post #119
tptacek wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost definitely not "one of the vulnerabilities" implicated in the story today, because nobody uses CSPRNGs based on Elliptic Curve.

so what was the vulnerability found by ms in 2007 that they are referring to? (search for 2007 in single page version at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet... ) edit: reading in more detail around there, i am pretty sure that section of the article is referring to the CSPRNG vulnerability above. the article covers a lot of ground and not all of it is about problems with ssl. that particular…

I don't know. I'm just saying, weakening a CSPRNG design that nobody uses or is ever likely to use (it's extremely expensive) is not a particularly meaningful action.

Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

#126

Post by tptacek »

tc wrote: post #68

This is really damaging. Not only will this cause other countries to put up barriers against US (and UK) services and products, it's going to affect uptake of standards developed here. On the lighter side, a treasure hunt was just announced. Can you find one of these vulnerabilities, or evidence of the NSA having attacked a particular system to steal keys? ---- [Edit 1] Some speculation: By careful hardware design --…

I would not be at all surprised to learn that the major advance these disclosures refer to is an on-demand RSA-1024 factoring capability. RSA-1024 is already known to be unsafe (Eran Tromer estimates a 7 figure cost for a dedicated hardware cracker, which is approximately the threshold DES was at in the late '90s, when nobody believed DES was secure). On-demand offline RSA-1024 attacks would have major implications, would be a huge advance in the state of the art, but also seems feasible given an effectively unlimited budget.

Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

#127

Post by chris_mahan »

w1ntermute wrote: post #96
eli wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that SSL is irrelevant because they've tapped whatever service you're connecting to.

This is all theoretical, but you could use decentralized services/protocols that would eliminate such an opportunity.

If I was in the NSA (which I am not) I would place a backdoor in the browser themselves, and since the browsers auto-update from the internet anyway, I would change the DNS provider for the machine being watched (remember the DNS settings generally default to that provided by your ISP) to point to the NSA-version of the browser, and then the user would be browsing securely, but after decryption and before display, the payload would be sent elsewhere to be collected.

I don't think this would be particulary hard either. For IE, the NSA can just get MSFT to do it. For Firefox, they can compile from source, and for Chrome, well, they can probably compile from source too, because they probably have access to the build source of Chrome, with or without GOOG mgmt knowledge.

Can anyone come up with a (technical) reason the NSA could not be doing this?

Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

#128

Post by guelo »

tptacek wrote: post #85

You can't have read Applied Cryptography from the mid-90s and not understand this to have been NSA's M.O. from the jump. Bruce Scheier, who was quoted in the Guardian piece about the same story, is America's foremost popularizer of the notion of NSA as crypto's global passive adversary. People who build real cryptosystems have never, ever been allowed to rely on the goodwill of the NSA not to cryptanalyze their syste…

That security systems are designed in the most paranoid fashion possible doesn't tell you anything about the real nature of the threat. Schneier's book doesn't tell you that the NSA has been strong arming corporations into giving up their private keys and into installing backdoors on chips.

In fact Schneier himself is outraged to the point that he seems to be calling for a redesign of basic Internet protocols and governance in his article today, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/governm...

Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

#129

Post by cldr »

philfreo wrote: post #73
untog wrote: post #29

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…

> That's the money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've just put back doors in. It's not like they've just gotten secret keys. They've specifically gotten chip manufacturers to add backdoors to hardware, as well as significantly influenced actual cryptography standards themselves: > "The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a…

I don't understand that part of the article, what algorithm standard was it? AES?

Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

#130

Post by magicalist »

philfreo wrote: post #73
untog wrote: post #29

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…

> That's the money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've just put back doors in. It's not like they've just gotten secret keys. They've specifically gotten chip manufacturers to add backdoors to hardware, as well as significantly influenced actual cryptography standards themselves: > "The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a…

Presumably that's DRBGs[1]? Does anyone actually use them in that form?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

Post reply on HN