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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

#51

Post by XorNot »

jonknee wrote: post #36
dailyrorschach wrote: post #3

This is likely a minority view, but I have no problem with the NSA being able to break encryption, that's in fact part of their job. Decoding encryption has long been part of their mission. I also suspect they're not alone in terms of signals intelligence groups in having this capability. The issue to me has always been how and what data they access and store, and how it is used.

> I have no problem with the NSA being able to break encryption, that's in fact part of their job. Their "breaking" of encryption is a combination of purposefully introducing vulnerabilities into standards, surreptitiously altering software and hardware to give the NSA a backdoor, hacking into private systems and stealing keys, etc etc. I'm cool with an NSA super computer trying to brute force my VPN traffic to YouTu…

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 US government vulnerable to foreign or non-state actors.

The same applies to anything you might imagine doing to chipmakers. Not only is there the risk of being found out (how do you explain to a talented engineer spotting a flaw in a schematic, how high up do you have to go to try and stop that leaking?) but there's the more serious risk that you've just added a backdoor to hardware you yourself need to be secure. Which again, could be discovered by an adversary and used against you.

This whole line of argument has always been speculative fiction on the part of the internet: it's looking for unicorns because you heard hoofs.

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

#52

Post by dannyobrien »

nrmilstein wrote: post #18

Can someone elaborate on how secure the underlying algorithms still are? Most of the NSA's "foiling" seems to be done via coercing corporations and side-channel attacks. Are TLS, AES, etc. still thought of as secure?

Bruce Schneier has seen the documents, and here's his advice: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-rema...

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

#53

Post by teleclimber »

untog wrote: post #29

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware. That's the money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've just put back door…

That's the quote that jumped out at me too. The solution for those who want to stay out of NSA's reach is to use your own hardware, and use open source software (where it's hard to put a backdoor without being discovered) and strong encryption.

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

#55

Post by smutticus »

Reminds me of this: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462&w=2

As someone who has been following the NSA and government monitoring of online activity for close to 15 years the Snowden leaks just keep taking the wind out of me. It's like everything that we thought might be going on was actually going on. When Theo de Raadt wrote the above mail I, like many at the time, assumed it was tinfoil hat territory. I was clearly wrong.

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

#56

Post by Zigurd »

w1ntermute wrote: post #17

Can someone who actually knows about encryption comment on whether it's actually physically feasible for the NSA to have actually broken, say, SSL 3.0 (which has 128 bits of entropy, IIRC) on a large scale (i.e., when you're sifting through petabytes of data on a daily basis)? And if this were really an issue, couldn't you just use 4096-bit RSA (unless they have managed to surreptitiously insert a backdoor in it)?

Your self-signed 4096-bit key is probably fine. Even better, be your own CA.

People assume CAs should be trusted but it's a huge game of chicken: If the NSA can't break SSL, you have to assume that either SSL is opaque to them, which these revelations seem to contradict, or they have corrupted the CAs.

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

#58

Post by tubbzor »

devx wrote: post #16
Zigurd wrote: post #9

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world. This is mostly a confirmation of what has been supposed: No magic, mostly bribed and coerced cooperation from the people who should…

So, should we re-evaluate if Intel/AMD's chips (and possibly even the new ARM ones) contain hardware backdoors for the NSA?

If the source code/hardware diagrams are kept private you should assume backdoors, always, with everything. How is there any other way to know for sure otherwise?

These government agencies are obviously dug much deeper in private industry than many expected so I wouldn't put it past them

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

#59

Post by kamjam »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #8

"the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards." This is the part that truly disgusts me.

Why are you surprised, or even disgusted? They've moved on from governments (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23762970) to using technology to do it. I use the term "moved on" loosely, because it is still happening no doubt. The US has long used it might and influence around the world, esp Latin America, to do very questionable things and really no one has batted an eye lid apart from the little guys getting screwed over. Terrorism is the just the new guise they are using to justify their actions.

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

#60

Post by kylec »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #49
kylec wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SSL relies on a chain of trust, and it's prudent to assume that the NSA has the private keys necessary to produce valid certificates that will be accepted by the certificates that ship with Windows, OS X, Firefox, etc out of the box. So man-in-the-middle attacks are certainly within their capability and fairly hard to detect. As to whether the NSA can passively intercept and decrypt SSL traffic, I don't know, but the…

How are they hard to detect? Wouldn't solutions like certificate pinning prevent this?

Yes, certificate pinning would alert the user to a MITM attack, but it's not commonly used. By "hard to detect", I meant that it's impossible to see simply by examining the certificate if it's genuine, you can only detect when the certificate changes. And since SSL certs expire and are re-issued all the time, it makes it a fairly large headache to continually try and guess whether the other party changed their own cert or if you are experiencing a MITM attack.
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