291–300 of 395 posts
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Some popular browsers still do not support newer versions. We tried turning this on with a newer, more secure key and ended up having downtime for some customers.
Which browsers in particular?
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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 pla…
But speaking as a non-American here, what do you expect? The NSA is in the spying business, and ultimately its performance is measured by results, not methodologies. All this hand-wringing is a bit like people expressing horror over the discovery that the CIA sometimes stoops to burglary or deception. I mean, in an ideal world the only way to compromise my password would be to for a beautiful lady spy to seduce me an…
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Basically, what we thought were the rules of the game Er...speak for yourself buddy. If you thought that you could get proper crypto security from a boxed software product then I'd like to offer you a fantastic deal on a bridge.
Do you think you can write one yourself? How many people are actually qualified to do that? Where do you think one would get proper crypto?
But if you want proper crypto and are willing to invest some time in it, I'd say take a strong open source algorithm and then rewrite it. Sure, maybe there's backdoors in the compilers, in the chips, maybe they have quantum computers and there's backdoors in the fabric of reality.
My point is not that I know unbeatably secure crypto, but that I have always assumed the NSA was using any and all means available to defeat crypto, and if you ever thought otherwise you were telling yourself fairy stories.
If we are going to vilify encryption, then we should just stop teaching math. That's all encryption is.
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But speaking as a non-American here, what do you expect? The NSA is in the spying business, and ultimately its performance is measured by results, not methodologies. All this hand-wringing is a bit like people expressing horror over the discovery that the CIA sometimes stoops to burglary or deception. I mean, in an ideal world the only way to compromise my password would be to for a beautiful lady spy to seduce me an…
And I would imagine that your password is complex enough that it would be hard to recite in a moment of passion. That being a rather single-thread activity.
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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.
I have given some thought to this kind of thing, and one thing I realized is that the limits of the trusting trust attack can be exploited as well. Let's support you only have one compiler. Now, it is going to try to insert the worm into any compiler it compiles, right? The problem is that it must be able to detect that it is actually compiling a compiler. This, however, is not a decidable problem. It is possible to…
i.e., you actually have to have an example of a compromised compiler, which pretty much solves the problem in the first place.
If you decidedly don't-trust the only compiler on your system, and don't trust outside sources, the only solution is to hand-assemble a new compiler on the system, and hope that at least the hardware is trustworthy. which it isn't, necessarily.
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Which browsers in particular?
Android Browser on Google TV, and Java libraries hitting our APIs. Google TV and Android browsers are critical to our business.
I can't comment on Android Browser on Google TV, but I very highly doubt it fails to support 2048-bit RSA keys. If that was the case, half the HTTPS websites would be unbrowsable(!) [1]
[1] Per the EFF SSL observatory dataset, roughly 1 in 2 websites uses key lengths strictly higher than 1024 bits.
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 --…
> but not so far that our adversaries can. Please clarify what you mean by "our". Please clarify what you mean by "adversaries".
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Ah, so if we can imagine it, it must be true.
No, but now we cannot just assume that cryptosystems are being developed in good faith or that mistakes are not actually covert sabotage. We need to check these systems before we put our trust in them.
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They pin certificates, so that a CA compromise that would enable MITM attack by the global passive adversary would be detectable (and in fact that mechanism has already been used to detect CA compromises.)
Would you say that using a browser like Chrome and using TLS 1.2 with 2048-bit RSA keys and AES, is likely to be safe for many years to come?
Do you think it's easier to discover attacks on AES or court order CA's?
You need to trust your OS, Chrome cryptography implementation, AES and RSA, and the end point, its OS and its possible role as a mute puppet, oh and don't forget everyones hardware!.