The Allies had broken most of the Nazi codes during WWII but they still withheld information from commanders unless the information concerned an absolutely strategic battlefield that hang on the balance. Better suffer a few dead or some minor setbacks than let the Germans grow suspicious and start doubting their cryptography. Morale of the story: unless you're the next Osama or Showden or some major narco-trafficker it doesn't apply to you.
N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
61–70 of 395 posts
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#62So, NSA has solved P vs NP and they're just not telling us?
What they have is a bunch of telepaths in tanks that can see dimly into the future and they recover the keys.
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#63Because 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.
Remember when Microsoft would trash Linux because it was open source and "not secure." Well, this settles it. Using your own hardware and open source software helps but someone determined will still get in...
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Remember when Microsoft would trash Linux because it was open source and "not secure." Well, this settles it. Using your own hardware and open source software helps but someone determined will still get in...
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.
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#65Can 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.
Or that SSL is irrelevant because they've tapped whatever service you're connecting to.
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#66Because 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…
Plus (form the Guardian article) there are covert agents in all the companies, presumably lifting all the certs, which may well be unauthorised, but you can't prosecute.
Do you know who your covert agents are?
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#67Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#68This is really damaging.
Not only will this cause other countries to put up barriers against US (and UK) services and products, it's going to affect uptake of standards developed here.
On the lighter side, a treasure hunt was just announced. Can you find one of these vulnerabilities, or evidence of the NSA having attacked a particular system to steal keys?
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[Edit 1] Some speculation:
By careful hardware design -- and lots of it -- the NSA may be able to find keys large enough that we would be mildly surprised but not shocked. It's not well known that searching for many keys in parallel amortizes well -- it's much cheaper than finding all the keys individually. DJB has a great paper about this:
http://cr.yp.to/snuffle/bruteforce-20050425.pdf
If I were looking for subverted hardware, I'd be really interested in reverse engineering Ethernet chips and BMCs. The CPU would be an obvious choice as well -- could there be some sequence of instructions that enables privilege escalation?
On protocols, the best sort of vulnerability for the NSA would be the kind that is still somewhat difficult and expensive to exploit. They want the security lowered just far enough that they can get the plaintext, but not so far that our adversaries can.
There is some history with not taking timing attacks seriously enough. Perhaps careful timing observation, which the NSA is well positioned to do, could give more of an edge than we suspect. Or perhaps you could push vendors to make their products susceptible to this kind of attack, secure in the belief that it may be difficult for others to detect.
[Edit 2]
I gave a talk that discussed what I think we as engineers should do here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7oK59DZwR4#t=1m46s
And Phil Zimmermann and I discussed a number of these issues in a Q&A session:
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#69Can 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)?
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).
Re: N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
#70>the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of American Civil War battles. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.
Spying on your own citizens codenamed as civil war. How nice.
>Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun. It does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program’s capabilities, methods and sources.
Once again, the people spying on everyone suck at keeping their own secrets. How many others have taken the information with them and sold it off instead of leaking it?
>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,
If you're a non-US company how can you keep trusting US IT vendors? I wouldn't want to be one of these companies' reps at Airbus for example.