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N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

nytimes.com

141–150 of 395 posts

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

#141
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit harder to sneak in junk in open source projects. You can see the checkins. However, you are right, if the flaw is in the algorithm itself, it's hopeless.

Is it harder to sneak in junk in open source projects? I'm reminded of Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture, "Reflections on Trusting Trust". http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html Could someone add a backdoor to git that hides backdoors from showing up in git? Could gcc be backdoored to add backdoors to arbitrary software? How likely is it that NSA has a few zero-days lying around they could use to hack into the…

There are countermeasures concerning the Trusting Trust attack: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tru..., though I'm not sure if anyone has ever seriously attempted to deploy them.

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

#142
post #86
post #12

So does this means they have broken or fund a bug in RSA, fast enough computers to brute force or solved the P versus NP problem. In decreasing chances of possibility. I am also an encryption noob, so I gather that if they have broken a crypto then my 4096 bit files will be no more secure than 1024 bit ones. Right?

The best publicly known attacks on RSA reduce the attack time by a few orders of magnitude at best. A functional quantum CPU could reduce that by a few more orders. Your 4096-bit RSA key is still 2^3072 times harder to break, so even with reductions we're still talking about "heat death of the universe" amounts of time to brute force. RSA has issues but as of yet hasn't yielded entirely to cryptanalysis. As the artic…

Are you sure about that? As far as I understand it, generic quantum computation would cut that '3072' in half, and using quantum computers specifically for factoring reduces problems to a low polynomial time.

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

#143
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit harder to sneak in junk in open source projects. You can see the checkins. However, you are right, if the flaw is in the algorithm itself, it's hopeless.

Is it harder to sneak in junk in open source projects? I'm reminded of Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture, "Reflections on Trusting Trust". http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html Could someone add a backdoor to git that hides backdoors from showing up in git? Could gcc be backdoored to add backdoors to arbitrary software? How likely is it that NSA has a few zero-days lying around they could use to hack into the…

Could you spot a "trusting-trust"-style backdoor in an FPGA you were offloading crypto to? How would you even start?

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sounds an awful lot like that's the one the New York times was describing. Can you think of any other standard that was published in 2006 by NIST which two Microsoft researchers discovered a flaw in in 2007? That sounds exactly like Dual_EC_DRBG

> Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.

> Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

> Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

> “Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.

Now, that may not have been an effective technique, as you point out it's so slow that no one is ever going to use it, and this vulnerability was discovered not long after it was published.

So, that's obviously not a vulnerability that they are actively exploiting. If they are actively exploiting a vulnerability that they introduced, it must be something else. It wasn't clear from the article that that's actually the case; it may be that the vulnerabilities they are exploiting are ones they've found, not introduced deliberately.

But it does appear to be an example of a vulnerability that they were able to get standardized, in the hopes of being able to exploit it. Until now, it has been only speculation that it was a deliberate vulnerability, but it now seems clear that it was.

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

#147
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gov…

Yeah, I'm a little baffled by Schneier's reaction to this. The revelation is advanced cryptanalytic capabilities at NSA, which is literally an article of faith with Schneier. Why is he freaking out about this when he didn't instead freak out about wholesale call record database dumps or AT&T fiber taps?

What do you mean by, "freak out?"

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

#148
post #25

Can someone who actually knows about encryption comment on whether it's actually physically feasible for the NSA to have actually broken, say, SSL 3.0 (which has 128 bits of entropy, IIRC) on a large scale (i.e., when you're sifting through petabytes of data on a daily basis)? And if this were really an issue, couldn't you just use 4096-bit RSA (unless they have managed to surreptitiously insert a backdoor in it)?

Brute force is only required if there isn't a vulnerability (either in the algorithm or that the NSA has a key). > Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.” > N.S.A. documen…

Neither of those apply to SSL 3.0, do they?

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

#149
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 think we know very well which encryption has been foiled by the NSA. This is not speculation, but quasi-certainty: 1024-bit RSA.

- Crytographers all acknowledge 1024-bit RSA is dead [1].

- Attack cost 10 years ago was estimated to be a few million USD to build a device able to crack a 1024-bit key every 12 months [2].

- "Much of" the "secure" HTTPS websites use such weak key sizes [3].

- NSA had a budget of 10.8 billion USD in 2013.

Drawing a conclusion is not very hard.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/05/researchers-307... [2] http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/twirl/ [3] https://www.eff.org/pages/howto-using-ssl-observatory-cloud

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

#150
post #87

I am so glad I resisted pressure from engineers working at Intel to let /dev/random in Linux rely blindly on the output of the RDRAND instructure. Relying solely on an implementation sealed inside a chip and which is impossible to audit is a BAD idea. Quoting from the article... "By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and g…

Was that really a seriously considered plan? I don't see how that would ever be a suitable /dev/random replacement. Obviously it works for /dev/urandom, but it should be added to the entropy pool for /dev/random at most.
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