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Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

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Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#51

Post by belorn »

beloch wrote: post #26

Assange certainly has a flair for the dramatic... but he doesn't understand encryption. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/wikileaks-insurance-file-decry... Wikileaks has distributed AES encrypted files that it claims are full of government secrets. They have withheld the information needed to decrypt some of those files ( although some keys have leaked from wikileaks, oddly enough) as a deterrent to persecution by govern…

The problem with one-time pads, is that they require a password with the same length as the data you want to encrypt. That mean, if you don't pre-distrubute the key as well, you are in the same boat as if you don't distribute anything at all. To give everyone the one-time pad key, its the same trouble as sending the actually data unencrypted to everyone. As a threat value, pre-releasing xor'ed data has exactly zero value.

One could suggest that he could use something semi-random but well published information instead of random generated blob for a one-time pad. Earth rotational speed, stock market numbers, intensity of the sun radiation comes to mind. In that case, the password would be the exact dates to take data from, something that could be spread faster than gigs of data. The problem with this is, as soon people start to use it, people would start testing those data to decrypt with, and the key-size essentially becomes the size of time ranges of existing data.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#52

Post by rdl »

casca wrote: post #34
beloch wrote: post #26

Assange certainly has a flair for the dramatic... but he doesn't understand encryption. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/wikileaks-insurance-file-decry... Wikileaks has distributed AES encrypted files that it claims are full of government secrets. They have withheld the information needed to decrypt some of those files ( although some keys have leaked from wikileaks, oddly enough) as a deterrent to persecution by govern…

To anyone reading this, please note that while some of beloch's points are valid, the analysis of AES and the breakability thereof is not. While it's true that at some point it's likely that AES will be broken, it's also true that at some point our solar system will be destroyed. OTP is theoretically unbreakable, but that would require a key that is as long as the ciphertext, at which point Mr Assange can just keep t…

Yeah, the whole point of distributing huge "insurance" data in an encrypted form is that the key is tiny. It's possible to maybe censor distribution of a 10GB file, at least generally, but it would be exceedingly difficult to prevent distribution of a 128-256 bit key. Literally you could shout it from the rooftops.

Nothing remains sensitive forever. It's likely everything in the "insurance file" would be public and mainly of interest to historians in 50-100 years, even without Assange. Most sensitive information in government ceases to be sensitive once everyone involved in the decision-making process is dead, and almost all of it is only operationally sensitive or for the lifetime of a piece of technology or particular source.

I mean, if we found out incontrovertible proof about the USS Maine or Gulf of Tonkin being engineered casus belli, who would really care?

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#53

Post by [deleted] »

beloch wrote: post #26

Assange certainly has a flair for the dramatic... but he doesn't understand encryption. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/wikileaks-insurance-file-decry... Wikileaks has distributed AES encrypted files that it claims are full of government secrets. They have withheld the information needed to decrypt some of those files ( although some keys have leaked from wikileaks, oddly enough) as a deterrent to persecution by govern…

[deleted]

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#54

Post by baddox »

doe88 wrote: post #50
beloch wrote: post #26

Assange certainly has a flair for the dramatic... but he doesn't understand encryption. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/wikileaks-insurance-file-decry... Wikileaks has distributed AES encrypted files that it claims are full of government secrets. They have withheld the information needed to decrypt some of those files ( although some keys have leaked from wikileaks, oddly enough) as a deterrent to persecution by govern…

> If he used a one-time-pad (Vernam cipher) and kept the key on his person he'd be in a far better position, but he's apparently too stupid to do this. How do you use a one-time pad? A 1.4 GB key... Yeahhhhhh, very practical. edit: and btw I hope you're also confident on the quality of your RNG to output 1.4 GB of random bytes.

I don't get it. You seem to be inferring that it's impractical to store a couple of gigabytes on your person.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#55

Post by htf »

beloch wrote: post #26

Assange certainly has a flair for the dramatic... but he doesn't understand encryption. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/wikileaks-insurance-file-decry... Wikileaks has distributed AES encrypted files that it claims are full of government secrets. They have withheld the information needed to decrypt some of those files ( although some keys have leaked from wikileaks, oddly enough) as a deterrent to persecution by govern…

In your scheme, the random key is as large as the message. It would be pointless to publish the ciphertext.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#56

Post by rdl »

baddox wrote: post #54
doe88 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he used a one-time-pad (Vernam cipher) and kept the key on his person he'd be in a far better position, but he's apparently too stupid to do this. How do you use a one-time pad? A 1.4 GB key... Yeahhhhhh, very practical. edit: and btw I hope you're also confident on the quality of your RNG to output 1.4 GB of random bytes.

I don't get it. You seem to be inferring that it's impractical to store a couple of gigabytes on your person.

It is difficult to store a couple of gigabytes, withstand a potentially intrusive search incident to arrest or intelligence action (i.e. on the Gulfstream, wearing a hood...) without that data being found or destroyed or removed from your control, and then widely disseminate that information while held in detention, potentially incommunicado, etc.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#58

Post by baddox »

ef4 wrote: post #23
anigbrowl wrote: post #9

First, recall that states are systems through which coercive force flows. Factions within a state may compete for support, leading to democratic surface phenomena, but the underpinnings of states are the systematic application, and avoidance, of violence. Land ownership, property, rents, dividends, taxation, court fines, censorship, copyrights and trademarks are all enforced by the threatened application of state vio…

Your argument is a non sequitur: states are necessary, therefore states are not systems through which coercive force flows. If you want to argue that states are necessary, fine. But call a spade a spade. Can you imagine a state that doesn't wield violence? That's what a state is . The lack of clarity on this issue leads to a lot of bad conclusions. When we argue that the state should solve any particular problem, we…

> Can you imagine a state that doesn't wield violence? That's what a state is.

That's part of what a state is, but it's more than that. A state is a violent organization that has managed to convince the vast majority of society that its violent actions are acceptable. In any conceivable society (state or no state), you will have violence. The difference between "criminals" (druglords, thieves, rapists, etc.) and "government" is that the vast majority of society condemns the violence of the former but accepts (and often even praises) the violence by the latter.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#59

Post by jlgreco »

beloch wrote: post #39
psykotic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AES is based on factoring. And you say _he_ doesn't understand cryptography?

I'm not in classical crypto, so I occasionally mess up and call algorithms based on computational difficult "based on factoring". The end result is the same though. Publication with delay.

RSA and AES are wildly different animals. You break RSA by factoring very large numbers. Currently this is done with GNFS, which is steadily improving. Theoretically, it may also be possible to do it much faster. Nobody brute forces RSA.

In order to crack AES though you need to either brute force it (which you will never do. Not that many bits, just forget about it.) Or you need a cryptanalytic attack that allows you to do it with reasonable computation and memory complexity. An attack that is currently unknown.

But surely such an attack could conceivably appear.. so what is the difference? The difference is that while RSA is a ticking clock (worse case scenario: slap on another ~256 bits to "factor-able" every 5 to 10 years), AES is only a ticking clock in the sense that we cannot rule out the possibility that one day it may start to tick.

If anyone in the world can crack AES, or will be able to crack AES anytime soon, it's the NSA, And it does not matter to Assange if they can crack it (unless the entire insurance file is a bluff).

AES was and is absolutely the correct choice for an insurance file. (I believe this is about when tptacek steps in, correctly calls me an idiot, and points out that another symmetric key cipher is a better choice.)

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#60

Post by jackfoxy »

[deleted] wrote: post #38
beloch wrote: post #26

Assange certainly has a flair for the dramatic... but he doesn't understand encryption. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/wikileaks-insurance-file-decry... Wikileaks has distributed AES encrypted files that it claims are full of government secrets. They have withheld the information needed to decrypt some of those files ( although some keys have leaked from wikileaks, oddly enough) as a deterrent to persecution by govern…

[deleted]

ANU claims to have a quantum number generator available over the internet for free http://qrng.anu.edu.au/index.php Interfaces in several languages already available, including an F# interface I published yesterday https://github.com/jackfoxy/RandomBitsSolution I'm not qualified to judge the efficacy of the ANU generator, but I suspect it is good.
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