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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

#381

Post by einhverfr »

masswerk wrote: post #337
mrb wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we know very well which encryption has been foiled by the NSA. This is not speculation, but quasi-certainty: 1024-bit RSA. - Crytographers all acknowledge 1024-bit RSA is dead [1]. - Attack cost 10 years ago was estimated to be a few million USD to build a device able to crack a 1024-bit key every 12 months [2]. - "Much of" the "secure" HTTPS websites use such weak key sizes [3]. - NSA had a budget of 10.8 bi…

Considering http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/ I wouldn't bet on "deep encryption" either ...

There are two very different questions:

1. What are the chances that crypto will keep the NSA out of your communications generally? and

2. What are the chances that crypto will keep the NSA out of your communications if they really, really want to read them?

Those questions are very different. I wonder, for example, of what would happen if all internet traffic was encrypted end to end with something as weak as DES. Could the NSA brute force it? Of course. Could they brute force all of it? doubtful.

One of the clear in-between-the-lines things in the article is that crypto is still problematic to the point where the NSA prefers to attack endpoints and get access that way instead of attacking the crypto itself.

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

#382

Post by phaemon »

mpyne wrote: post #380
phaemon wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 we…

> The laws against Holocaust denial and Nazi symbols were pretty much forced by the USA. So why doesn't German remove the laws now that they've served their wartime reconstruction purpose? And that is why they were put in, the same reason that even in the U.S. free speech was curtailed in many areas during the American Civil War.

Are you asking why a German politician doesn't start a campaign seeking to alter the German constitution in favour of allowing Nazism?

I think you know the answer to that one ;-)

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

#383

Post by B-Con »

> The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products to the agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products.

That sounds a lot like "the division to provide security advice was providing advice that would make it easier for the NSA to break".

Page 4 of the article was the most interesting.

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

#385

Post by mrb »

leokun wrote: post #374
mrb wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must have been something else that broke it, not the key size. Android Browser definitely supports 2048-bit RSA certs. Maybe a root cert was absent from the browser (GoDaddy would be using a different root for 2048-bit certs?). Or maybe intermediate certs were missing in the certificate path. It sounds like your engineer did not spend much time trying to figure out what aspect of SSL/X.509 was actually causing the…

There were no problems with accessing the site with Chrome or other modern browsers. What you described would have been a problem with all browsers, and anyway GoDaddy supplies all the files you need in a single zip file, including the intermediate certs. We did simply revert the SSL key, once we isolated that to be the problem. There is no pressing business need for a 2048-bit key.

That is incorrect. Mobile browsers, the JVM, etc, notoriously lag behind desktop browsers when it comes to updating the list of root certs (and intermediate certs too, but that seems irrelevant in your case). The consequence is that a site can be accessed from the desktop, but not from a mobile.

It was a recurrent problem at a previous job with a Java app accessing HTTPS sites. We could not always update the JVM (which comes with the most recent list of roots in "cacerts"), so we had to develop a solution to push the latest cacerts truststore to our application. Problem fixed.

Do you know if Android Browser users reported at least an ability to click through an SSL warning to get to the site?

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

#386

Post by leokun »

mrb wrote: post #385
leokun wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were no problems with accessing the site with Chrome or other modern browsers. What you described would have been a problem with all browsers, and anyway GoDaddy supplies all the files you need in a single zip file, including the intermediate certs. We did simply revert the SSL key, once we isolated that to be the problem. There is no pressing business need for a 2048-bit key.

That is incorrect. Mobile browsers, the JVM, etc, notoriously lag behind desktop browsers when it comes to updating the list of root certs (and intermediate certs too, but that seems irrelevant in your case). The consequence is that a site can be accessed from the desktop, but not from a mobile. It was a recurrent problem at a previous job with a Java app accessing HTTPS sites. We could not always update the JVM (whi…

Yes, now I remember, I think you are correct. They were able to click through the SSL warning but because we use socket.io they had additional problems. Some of our customers do not employ full time engineers and whatever script they were using with our API were using libraries that couldn't handle the SSL cert change and they could not easily update them. We couldn't ask our customers, mostly sales and customer service oriented directors, to handle a complicated certificate change either.

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

#387

Post by solnyshok »

jlgaddis wrote: post #356
solnyshok wrote: post #72

Knowing what kind of encryption NSA uses internally, can tell all about what is compromised and what's still secure.

Every publicly known cipher is compromised then? The ciphers that the NSA primarily uses (internally) are classified.

wouldn't it be logical for them to use ciphers that they do not know how to compromise yet?

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

#388

Post by lambda »

tytso wrote: post #371
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…

If Matt protested, he did so quietly/privately. I wasn't aware of the fact that he had stepped down until the authors of the paper described in http://factorable.net showed up and pointed out we had a really bad problem for embedded devices on the internet. I had always assumed he had gotten too busy and distracted on other interests, since I do follow LKML, and I didn't see any kind of public debate/controversy abou…

Ah, here's the thread I was looking for:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350/focus=117...

It doesn't really look like he had NAKed it on paranoia grounds, but more on design grounds; others brought up the paranoia arguments. You were even involved in that thread, so you should have seen his stepping down, although he didn't submit a patch to MAINTAINERS.

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

#389

Post by wiml »

captainmojo wrote: post #80
untog wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even "your own hardware" is going to be pretty damn hard: working with chipmakers to insert back doors So you're going to need to make your own chips, too.

http://opencores.org/or1k/Main_Page

The following isn't directly applicable to your suggestion, but it's a reminder that an FPGA, just like a CPU, may not be doing exactly and only what you told it to do:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/sec_news.html#Backdoor

> Abstract. This paper is a short summary of the first real world detection of a backdoor in a military grade FPGA. [....] The backdoor was found to exist on the silicon itself, it was not present in any firmware loaded onto the chip. [....]

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

#390

Post by wiml »

gaius wrote: post #206
njharman wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I'm afraid it is you who are mistaken... About a great many things.

Now, witness the power of my fully operational Utah data center.
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