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

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–138 of 138 posts

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

#131

Post by jongraehl »

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…

Tor messages are disclosed only if the NSA etc. run enough of the entry/exit nodes. Simply passively recording Tor traffic might let you do traffic analysis, but won't let you deduce the contents of that traffic.

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

#132

Post by jlgaddis »

mey wrote: post #67
Xcelerate wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you saw the last part of my post :) I mentioned the same thing about brute-forcing and focused on the mathematical weaknesses aspect of it. I have written some ECDSA code myself from scratch so I am familiar at least with the very basics of it.

Yeah I think I started writing before I really got your question, my apologies :) It is very possible that government based research on crypto cracking is several years ahead of the rest of the world, but the attitude to these systems around the time of the dot com bubble was switching from security through obscurity to working in the open. The reason is the research cuts both ways, the US relies on AES as much as yo…

> the US relies on AES as much as you or I

Yes, but the government also has other (non-public) algorithms/ciphers/etc. that are used internally.

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

#133

Post by tedks »

david_shaw wrote: post #63
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…

I absolutely agree with you, but I was addressing the potentially misleading title of the article, not the current dragnet observation (which is why I quoted the title of the article). Many people that may not be experienced in cryptography may think that these techniques would protect them from law enforcement, or that their encryption would actually be "NSA proof." Your description of secure communication (Tor, ano…

You're quite welcome. I'm glad you liked the description. The title of the article is indeed misleading; a better one would be "PRISM-proof."

With a total record of the entire Internet (global passive adversary), you could definitely defeat anything using Tor, but I wonder if you could make it significantly harder still by randomly generating XMPP accounts every time. There's a potentially infinite space, and you can do XMPP registration in-band.

Of course, you could also just run XMPP servers locally as chat endpoints, and never have subpoena-able records. These could be Tor hidden services, which would give you the added bonus of global reachability. I think this eliminates most correlation attacks you could do; all you'd see on Alice and Bob's endpoints would be Tor circuits.

All this will make for a really interesting Wire reboot, if/when that happens.

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

#134

Post by jlgaddis »

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?

Inside the TPM would be a great place to store the private key, simply because it cannot be extracted.

Of course, that introduces a new problem: securely backing up the private key.

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

#135

Post by jlgaddis »

kimlelly wrote: post #23
kimlelly wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you back these calculations up with a known scientific source?

@aryastark - What's the nature of AES 128 & Co., meaning: Who can and cannot discover flaws? Is this like open source where the whole world can watch or is this somehow a closed thing like Windows, MacOS, etc.?

As a (related) example, consider the SHA family of hashing algorithms.

Competitions are held in which anyone can submit their own algorithm as a possible contender. Like a beauty pageant, the entries are narrowed down over a few rounds until just a few are left. Eventually, one algorithm is chosen and declared the winner!

The whole process is done in the open and, similar to RFCs, anyone who wishes to may provide feedback.

The SHA-3 competition took roughly five years. You can read about the whole process on the NIST's web site:

    http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/index.html
I'm not a developer or math whiz so most of the underlying principles of crypto are over my head but read about the process (above) is quite interesting and gave me a much better understanding in general.

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

#136

Post by jlgaddis »

kimlelly wrote: post #44
glurgh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are openly available, highly reviewed algorithms - their adoption as standards, too, is done by a process of open competition. And it's probably safe to say that the amount of research and analysis being done on them in the open exceeds that done in secret by government agencies by a wide margin.

Thanks, very important to know!

Also, note that while AES and friends are public and designed "in the open", the government also has a number of algorithms that are developed and used internally and are not "public".

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

#137

Post by sneak »

jongraehl wrote: post #131
sneak wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Tor messages are disclosed only if the NSA etc. run enough of the entry/exit nodes. Simply passively recording Tor traffic might let you do traffic analysis, but won't let you deduce the contents of that traffic.

They'd have the whole of the tor network, including entry and exit nodes. Why run your own exit nodes when you can just sniff the traffic of the existing ones?

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

#138

Post by Balgair »

ef4 wrote: post #110
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…

It's even worse than you think, because several of the things you said in there don't actually make sense. It sounds like you possibly didn't manage to get the message encrypted at all, just signed. And how you exchange public keys matters a great deal -- if you just send them over email, you haven't actually achieved any meaningful security. So yes. The entire process is a usability nightmare.

....fudge....
Post reply on HN