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N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

nytimes.com

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

#361

Post by harshreality »

mindslight wrote: post #69
mpyne wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protocol itself would still seem to be safe (or rather, have safe combinations of key exchange and encryption). But it is certainly feasible that if they manage to find cracks in popular-but-old communications protocols that they are able to automatically decrypt them, or use prior key recovery successes to bootstrap fast attacks on new communications from the same host. What would be interesting is if NSA's own…

Backdoors in the NSA recommendations could be due to trapdoor functions that only NSA has the key for. Other parties would therefore be unable to utilize that backdoor (short of the secret being exfiltrated).

Inserting such a keyed backdoor is much more difficult to do undetected, and more limited in scope (has to be done separately for every crypto algorithm being backdoored), than introducing a flaw in a hardware or software RNG implementation.

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

#362

Post by gaius »

Zoepfli wrote: post #321
lambda wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt Mackall, the former maintainer of /dev/random, actually stepped down over this issue, because Linus overrode Matt and applied Intel's patch that used their hardware random number generator directly: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.cryptography.r... > It's worth noting that the maintainer of record (me) for the Linux RNG quit the project about two years ago precisely because Linus decided to include…

Sounds like Linus has some explaining to do...

Indeed. Where's Mr Sweary now, eh?

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

#363

Post by theintern »

pja wrote: post #220
albertsun wrote: post #84

"In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times." Wow.... this really puts all the furor over Huawei contracts in the US in context.

All that furore over Huawei contracts in the US was just projection wasn't it? You're might be more secure buying your network kit from Huawei than from a US manufacturer.

Sounds like it was justified really, the NSA know since they've done similar things themselves that it's possible, so it's not a stretch to assume China is doing the same thing.

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

#364

Post by XorNot »

alasdair_ wrote: post #185
XorNot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will bet good money that the NSA has never bothered to try and plant backdoors in encryption standards. If the NSA recommends AES to the US government, but knows there's a vulnerability, then they have to assume that any adversary may be as good as whoever designed it. Which means an adversary would be perfectly capable of discovering and exploiting the weakness. Which in turn means the NSA has just made the entire…

Did you even read the article? The leaked documents confirm that this is exactly what happened.

"The leaked documents" is as much detail as the article goes into. Given the history of reporting on this matter and the walking back done on all the original leaks, color me skeptical its as dramatic as it sounds and not what I said: the NSA engages in a bunch of spycraft since encryption is based on trust, trust is easy to compromise, but again: I'll bet AES encryption has no easily exploitable weaknesses, and SSL is completely secure provided you don't need to use the root chain of trust associations which all ultimately wind up at "the government".

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

#365

Post by XorNot »

tanzam75 wrote: post #352
jlgaddis wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use AES when dealing with "outsiders", but I have trouble believing that they use it internally (and instead use the Suite A ciphers -- it's impossible for others to break them if they don't know anything about them, right?)

> (and instead use the Suite A ciphers -- it's impossible for others to break them if they don't know anything about them, right?) It is possible to break an unpublished cipher. Just more difficult, because you've got to figure out the algorithm as well as the key. As long as it is similar to existing algorithms, you can try and look for differences. For example, American cryptanalysts broke the Japanese Purple ciphe…

That said, it's unlikely the NSA has truly novel algorithms. They recruit from the general public like everyone else. There principle advantage is that they're big (working for the NSA is appealing) and can classify in-house breakthroughs.

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

#367

Post by XorNot »

F30 wrote: post #269
Achshar wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am confused. When I see HN or facebook certs they show 128 bit encryption in the browser box. 128 bit seems pretty low.

This is the size of the AES key. AES is a symmetric algorithm and 128 bit are still considered solid there, although the trend is moving towards 256 bit. What we're talking about here is the key size of RSA, which is an asymmetric algorithm. If you don't know the difference, go find a basic crypto tutorial. As you can read above, 1024 bit RSA is probably borken. I wouldn't trust 2048 bit too much as well. Also, progr…

That said, 256-bit isn't really that much of an improvement for AES - its favored since that's the US standard for Top Secret classification, but in practice any attack which brings down AES-128 will almost certainly get AES-256 as well. I've switched most of my SSH servers over to default to 128-bit AES ciphers since the difference in difficulty seems small enough that it won't matter if someone actually tries targeting it and can succeed.

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

#368

Post by phaemon »

GabrielF00 wrote: post #342
toyg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Completely off-base. The US has, by longstanding tradition, had a more expansive attitude towards free speech than Europe. Consider blasphemy laws in the UK, which were only abolished in 2008 but would never have been constitutional in the US. Consider laws against Holocaust denial or displaying Nazi symbols in continental Europe that would be unconstitutional in the US. In Germany you can be arrested for displaying…

> The US has, by longstanding tradition, had a more expansive attitude towards free speech than Europe...Consider laws against Holocaust denial or displaying Nazi symbols in continental Europe that would be unconstitutional in the US. In Germany you can be arrested for displaying a swastika.

These laws were included in the German constitution following the "denazification" of Germany by the USA, where Nazi symbols were banned and literature burned.

The laws against Holocaust denial and Nazi symbols were pretty much forced by the USA. It's extremely ironic how often they're mentioned as an illustration of the USA's devotion to free speech.

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

#369

Post by XorNot »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #346
anigbrowl wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think there's some cognitive dissonance at work here in the hacker community. It's easier to look up to the NSA et. al. if they're just better at math than you. It's so clean, so pure, if you ignore the black-bag jobs and kinetic side of their work.

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/538/

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

#370

Post by XorNot »

Ergomane wrote: post #359
LnxPrgr3 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://underhanded.xcott.com/ You can't rely on a backdoor looking like this: if(!strcmp(username, "secretagentman")) { … }

The Debian OpenSSL snafu showed that even rather blatant changes get missed. Anything in the leaked docs on that particular incident?

The OpenSSL snafu showed us all that _code commenting_ is a really good idea.
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