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?
N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
171–180 of 395 posts
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#172Earlier 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?
I think there is a fundamental difference advanced Cryptanalysis (which we always assumed they had due to hiring practices and history) and being able to break crypto by subverting infrastructure.
If the NSA said, "Our super smart brain trust figured out how to own your stuff with math five years ago ... ha ha!", I think we would be Totally Fine with that. Hats off to them for winning that game, but at least they played mostly fairly. (In theory.)
However, this is different. Winning the cryptanalyis game because they backdoored protocols, gained access to trusted entities' private keys, etc, just means that they are really good at the SPYING game, not at the cryptanalysis game, and somehow that just feels worse.
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#173You 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…
It may be widely believe in cryptography circles, but this release wipes away the plausible deniability that governments and American corporations have always depended on. Just last week, the German government was pooh-pooh'ing claims that Windows and TPM chips had backdoors inserted by the NSA.[1] These documents all but confirm it.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/german-government-refutes-windows-backd...
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, th…
Browsers auto-update over SSL and hopefully use certificate pinning.
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus (form the Guardian article) there are covert agents in all the companies, presumably lifting all the certs, which may well be unauthorised, but you can't prosecute. Do you know who your covert agents are?
Why couldn't you prosecute, if you found out? I assume theft is still theft, even if done by a government employee.
Why couldn't who prosecute? That's a function of the government; a prosecutor is not obliged to engage in a case (formally, get an indictment out of a grand jury) whenever they believe a crime to have been committed.
Undercover agents at all levels of law enforcement commit apparently criminal acts every day, with no fear of prosecution. There's no reason for this to be any different.
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sure. I think we agree. If "it" is a crypto weakness they are actually exploiting, "it" is not Dual-EC DRBG.
Ah, yes, I wasn't trying to say they were exploiting that particular vulnerability. Just that we now have better evidence that that really was a (rather poor) attempt to subvert standards to make them easier to decrypt.
The NSA seems to be really divided between SIGINT and COMSEC. COMSEC wants to provide good, strong encryption, that can help secure US government and corporate communication. SIGINT wants to be able to read everyone's traffic.
For example, they changed the DES s-boxes in a way that made it more secure against differential cryptanalysis. They've released SELinux. There is a part of the NSA that does actually try to make encryption standards stronger.
But then there's the part that advocates for the Clipper chip, advocates for controls on exporting strong crypto, or strongarms NIST into standardizing Dual-EC DRBG. And that part does real damage, as everyone suffers from the weak export crypto (either people overseas have to work on strong crypto, or products are released with weak or no crypto because regulatory compliance is too complicated), or people stop trusting US software and hardware.
The NSA seems to be doing some real damage to technology companies in the US. I had thought that they had gotten better about it, after they gave up on the clipper chip and lifted most of the export controls, but it looks like I was wrong, they've just decided to take more covert routes to do the same thing, with the hope that none of the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who could find out about it would leak that information.
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#177Where are the original documents (primary sources)?
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#178I wonder if RHEL and Ubuntu distros have NSA/FBI root kit backdoors in their kernel binaries and/or subscription services.
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the quote that jumped out at me too. The solution for those who want to stay out of NSA's reach is to use your own hardware, and use open source software (where it's hard to put a backdoor without being discovered) and strong encryption.
That's a false sense of security. You can inspect every line of code in SSL but unless you are a world-class cryptographer yourself, how will you spot a backdoor in the algorithm ?
Your statement reveals a real lack of understanding of opensource. Hint; it's open to all, all includes world-class cryptographers. Each contributes their ability for the greater good of all. WCC may not spend their time coding or packaging or whatever. Others will.
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#180This is likely a minority view, but I have no problem with the NSA being able to break encryption, that's in fact part of their job. Decoding encryption has long been part of their mission. I also suspect they're not alone in terms of signals intelligence groups in having this capability. The issue to me has always been how and what data they access and store, and how it is used.
There are a couple of other issues, even if one agreed with your view:
1. They obviously can't keep their own secrets, so it's unlikely that they will do any better than keeping yours. Eventually, your data will leak out to non-NSA people.
2. By adding backdoors, they weaken the encryption. This implies that anyone with sufficient skill who goes looking for backdoors may be able to exploit the hole that the NSA opened up. This is a big deal, especially if you have secrets that you need to protect.