341–350 of 395 posts
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> but not so far that our adversaries can. Please clarify what you mean by "our". Please clarify what you mean by "adversaries".
Come now, we know enough about the NSA at this point to know that our, adversaries = America, !America right?
If you are not the U.S. government, you are their adversary (even if you are a U.S. business or citizen).
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…
Look at what's happening in the UK, in Australia, in France, in Italy, in Spain... the Chinese model is winning hearts and minds of politicians everywhere, and how could it not? If you're into politics, you likely want to reach a Platonic ideal of harmonic society, where nobody is offended, nobody is threatened, and all laws are perfectly respected and enacted. You can't have that on a fully-open network. How can you…
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In this pdf[1] , they discuss security issues in intel chips.They mention strange responses from intel. Also it's possible, but very hard to exploit those issues , which is optimal in this case. 1[] http://pavlinux.ru/jr/Software_Attacks_on_Intel_VT-d.pdf
Forgive me if I don't open a PDF from a .ru domain. (and yes, I know how silly that response is)
* Open the PDF in a non-adobe reader such as Foxit and Sumatra w/ JavaScript disabled
* Both FF and Chromes internal PDF viewers ignore JS
* You can preview a PDF in Google drive
* Open the PDF in a sandboxed VM.
Guessing for your history of spammming 1 line pointless comments, you probably already know this.
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".
Why is this not just the same as the other clever ways the smart NSA listens in things (not that I'd like but there's something more)?
Well, the thing about backdoors is they get installed on the outside of everyone's software/chips/machines and then ... someone else, someone with less to loose than the NSA, starts to use them for more crudely nefarious reasons, either criminal activity or spying by other nations.
All of this bears resemblance to the former USSR. Once bureaucracy claimed unlimited political power, the next step was for the "mafiya" to take advantage of the universal silence and surveillance.
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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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Forgive me if I don't open a PDF from a .ru domain. (and yes, I know how silly that response is)
If you were actually interested in the content, there are countless ways to open a PDF safely. * Open the PDF in a non-adobe reader such as Foxit and Sumatra w/ JavaScript disabled * Both FF and Chromes internal PDF viewers ignore JS * You can preview a PDF in Google drive * Open the PDF in a sandboxed VM. Guessing for your history of spammming 1 line pointless comments, you probably already know this.
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Another difference: You don't need a gun to perform the most basic of functions securely. They occupy exactly opposite quadrants on the useful/dangerous axis.
The ability to defend one's self is a basic function. Being dangerous can be useful. Encryption is a tool for guarding privacy, and weapons are tools for guarding against physical threats.
There is a cost to having a society saturated with firearms. The vivid, individualistic, but rarely used benefit of personal defence has to be weighed against the boring, common case of excessive violence and escalation due to access to and glamorization of firearms.
This essentially bolsters the claims in this article that the NSA has "neutralized" SSL. http://rt.com/usa/allegations-nsa-tool-decrypts-https-085/
It's a MITM solution that injects fake certificates, i.e. nothing groundbreaking and equivalent to compromised/corrupt CAs (which, as we know, exist and are able and willing to hand out fake intermediate certs etc. to rogue entities). The Whole CA ecosystem is broken and basically snake oil and pretty much everyone knows it.