Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–395 of 395 posts

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

#391

Post by wiml »

16s wrote: post #121

Some organizations have IT security departments that attempt to foil encryption already. They use devices to terminate SSL before it leaves their network and forge certs back to clients and basically act as a MITM for the clients making the TLS/SSL request. They do this to inspect the traffic before it leaves the network. I predict that in the next 5 to 10 years, many organizations across all industry sectors will dr…

Cisco firewalls, by default, perform a MITM protocol downgrade attack on the SMTP sessions they see. They modify the SMTP setup to prevent the endpoints from negotiating STARTTLS and cause them to fall back to cleartext communication. Has been true for years.

You can turn it off... but how many admins do? If you want an example of behavior which is completely plausibly-deniable, but which immensely reduces internet security, this is a good one.

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

#392

Post by nathan_long »

mpyne wrote: post #379
nathan_long wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> what do you expect? The NSA is in the spying business, and ultimately its performance is measured by results, not methodologies. The NSA, as a government agency, is in the business of serving the US citizens who pay its salaries and acting in their interests. Ultimately its performance is measured by us. My boss would fire me if I put a backdoor in his email.

> My boss would fire me if I put a backdoor in his email. Then why is it OK for Snowden to do the same to his employer?

The way I see it, Snowden reported the misconduct of his employer (the NSA) to their employer (the public).

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

#393

Post by nathan_long »

mpyne wrote: post #378
nathan_long wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> breaking crypto is hazardous to the populace independently of how it's broken, right? Breaking crypto from the outside proves that it's breakable; if the NSA can do it, it's just a matter of time until others do. Undermining cryto from the inside means deliberately exposing all communicates to increased risk of hacking by anyone, anywhere. Quite different.

> Undermining cryto from the inside means deliberately exposing all communicates to increased risk of hacking by anyone, anywhere Well, that does depend on how they weaken it. If it gets weakened such that it goes from "impossible" to "nation-states can crack" then there's still only 3-4 agencies in the whole world that could decrypt. But that would also tend to preclude passive wideranging cryptanalysis, which is wh…

> If it gets weakened such that it goes from "impossible" to "nation-states can crack" then there's still only 3-4 agencies in the whole world that could decrypt.

You'd have to be talking about a gigantic change for it to benefit them. I want my crypto to take 10 billion years to crack; intelligence agencies want to crack it in a week.

And what they can crack in a week today, hobbyists will be able to crack in a day a few years from now.

Weakening crypto means opening it to every criminal in the world. Computers get faster and secret backdoors get leaked.

If it isn't safe from everyone, in the long run, it isn't safe from anyone.

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

#394

Post by Filligree »

_phred wrote: post #308
Filligree wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Shor's algorithm renders any use of RSA... pointless. And while there are limits to the applicability of Grover's algorithm, you're correct that it effectively cuts the number of bits in any cryptosystem it applies to in half. Which, to my nonexpert eyes, looks to be most of them.

Hmm, yes, I think I conflated the asymmetric vs symmetric cases. Shor's algorithm is very tasty, but when the real world demonstrations at top research facilities are saying, "yes, we factored 21 into 7x3, but WITH ENTANGLEMENT"[1] it makes me think that scaling to RSA-size prime factors is still a good way off. Listen, the US government is powerful, but building a full scale quantum crypto decoder ring in complete s…

Hey, I wasn't claiming practical quantum computers existed. Just that, at whatever point running Shor's algorithm becomes practical, RSA will be pointless.

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

#395

Post by Filligree »

mcppherrinrinm wrote: post #306
Filligree wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter of which sounds suspiciously like what a quantum computer does. How sure are we that BQP != NP?

We aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP However a quantum machine that would be capable of post-selection is described by the more powerful class PostBQP = PP, and we know that PP includes NP, so this justifies your analogy. I don't know much about quantum physics or quantum computing, so I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that post-selection is more of a philosophical construct than something that is physica…

I've seen post-selection demonstrated in a laboratory. It definitely isn't just a philosophical construct, except inasmuch as what it says about time making people want it to be less than real, and logic doesn't work that way.

As for whether you could make a PostBQP-capable computer, though.. I don't think so, at least in the most general case. I don't understand this nearly well enough to be sure, but from what I've heard, tricking causality like that has the problem that you're increasing the chance of your circuitry failing right along with the chance of getting the right result, and quantum computers are already hard enough.

Post reply on HN