How to Protect Yourself from NSA Attacks on 1024-bit DH

Post by alwillis » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 9:59 PM UTC

PlzSnow wrote: post #121

schoen wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you're calling section 4.1 of the paper "magical"; do you have something specific in it to object to that makes you think the estimates are severely mistaken? In order to defend against adversaries with undisclosed capabilities, you have to extrapolate known attack methods and hardware to produce estimates of what may be practical. Every paper that proposes keylength and parameter size recommendations d…

It is magical. There is a magic 36000-core (?) computer that has been running for years (?). Well no, the paper just invents it. On the hearsay that an "anonymous nsa official" said they'd cracked something. It astonishes me that people are running about like rabbits in a headlight on such flimsy nonsense. But I understand. It makes us feel important. The new James Bond movie is coming out. And imagine! We're like a…

Post by diafygi » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

decisiveness wrote: post #12

diafygi wrote: post #2

Does anyone have links to bugs for the affected programs to make 2048 the minimum by default? It seems like we shouldn't have to continue to manually configure secure settings. OpenVPN? SSH? Nginx? Apache? Where are the bugs to make these not use insecure dhparams by default?

Easy-rsa[1] (OpenVPN's key/cert generation/signing tool) version 3 will generate a 2048 bit diffie hellman key by default. Previous versions of easy-rsa used 1024 bit as default. Here is a comment written in the vars configuration file for easy-rsa 2.2.2: # Increase this to 2048 if you # are paranoid. This will slow # down TLS negotiation performance # as well as the one-time DH parms # generation process. export KEY…

Post by pdkl95 » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 3:56 PM UTC

jokoon wrote: post #123

leepowers wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protecting yourself against the NSA is a good proxy for protecting yourself against other bad actors. The NSA has thousands of employees, a multi-billion dollar budget, and works 24 hours to crack, hack or otherwise gain unauthorized access to computer systems. So, if I can defend myself against the NSA, I've probably inoculated myself against other attackers using similar attack vectors.

I highly doubt that, and I don't think it's a good logic. You cannot compare the power, tools and jurisdiction the NSA has and compare that to other bad actors. The NSA literally has the right to spy on you, but it will get very difficult for somebody else to do something comparable if they don't have the same resources AND the same intentions.

Post by ionised » Mon, Oct 19, 2015, 9:52 AM UTC

PlzSnow wrote: post #118

alwillis wrote: post #108

My big picture take-away is: It seems that the NSA (and possibly other state-level actors) can access encrypted traffic that uses 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman that use commonly-used prime numbers. This means HTTPS, SSH, IPsec, SMTPS, and protocols that rely on TLS are potentially vulnerable. Where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire and there’s a lot of smoke indicating the NSA can do this. They have the money, technology, infr…

"It seems that the NSA (and possibly other state-level actors) can access encrypted traffic that uses 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman that use commonly-used prime numbers." How does it "seem this"? There's no evidence, no plausibility, no sense here whatsoever. Someone hypothetically conjectured a magic all-powerful computer that could magically crack a prime, and that would magically make us all vulnerable to the government…

Post by ionised » Mon, Oct 19, 2015, 10:03 AM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #127

ironsides wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That my friend is called Democracy. When a majority rules..

And that's why the United States was designed precisely to avoid becoming a democracy and instead be a republic.