151–160 of 395 posts
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…
The entire thing seems hand-wavy.
What's truly frightening is this line from the Guardian's article on the topic: > The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace". What does that even mean? That statement is at the same time paranoid, arrogant, and subtly threatening. It's as if to say that without the ability to decrypt interesting traffic, the NSA would be…
I feel like these kinds of articles are meant to induce a sense of hopelessness regarding the ability to push back against the NSA. If it turns out one way functions actually don't exist, I'll give in and learn to love big brother. Withstanding that, I'll continue considering communications freedom (and all that it implies) as our manifest right and view these types of breaks as implementation errors.
What this sort of article does to me (unlike you, I make no claims to know what the article was 'meant' to do, other than report the news) is make it clear that we need to push back against the NSA _politically_ to win, make what they are doing illegal, change the gag order laws, etc. We aren't going to beat them technologically, but (for those of in the U.S.), it's theoretically a democracy, we can tell them to stop.
I've seen that argument made before, several times, in essays linked to on HN. It's a political problem, not a tech problem, that the NSA can force corporations to install back doors and give the NSA the keys.
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.
People who intend to enter a middle school and kill kids can hide their plans and communications using 256-bit encryption. Edit: Devil's advocate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?"
Can someone elaborate on how secure the underlying algorithms still are? Most of the NSA's "foiling" seems to be done via coercing corporations and side-channel attacks. Are TLS, AES, etc. still thought of as secure?
Bruce Schneier has seen the documents, and here's his advice: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-rema...
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…
A bug deliberately introduced in an AES instruction, or in general purpose instructions that detects crypto operations and leaks information somehow, is much, much harder to implement and hide than a pseudo-random number generator that passes all tests that you apply to it, but produces predictable output for someone who knows some secret key.
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…
Can you expand a bit on chrome's anti-surveilance capabilities?