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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

#71

Post by gaius »

teleclimber wrote: post #53
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.

That's a false sense of security. You can inspect every line of code in SSL but unless you are a world-class cryptographer yourself, how will you spot a backdoor in the algorithm?

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

#73

Post by philfreo »

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 money quote there- the NSA hasn't cracked encryption. They've just put back doors in.

It's not like they've just gotten secret keys. They've specifically gotten chip manufacturers to add backdoors to hardware, as well as significantly influenced actual cryptography standards themselves:

> "The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

> “Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.

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

#74

Post by joelhaasnoot »

kylec wrote: post #60
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ce…

Isn't it considered best practice, especially for situations where you can control the client - i.e. banking apps on your phone?

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

#75

Post by tubbzor »

smtddr wrote: post #21
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 a problem with encryption being breakable, regardless of who's doing the breaking. I want encryption to be mathematically solid with the only option being brute-force older-than-age-of-earth time. When we get to quantum computing, then I don't know what we'll do...

Everyone focuses on the decrypting power of quantum computing, which is warranted as it will break _modern_ cryptography (in theory). However, think about the encrypting power a quantum computer will have; being able to generate completely random keys among other facets of crypto that seem implausible with modern computers. I think it will just open the door to a whole new science of crypto we haven't reached yet.

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

#76

Post by gaius »

XorNot wrote: post #51
jonknee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Which in turn means the NSA has just made the entire US government vulnerable to foreign or non-state actors.

Yes, and it says this in the article.

And it makes perfect sense too. If you were the NSA, wouldn't you want a heads up if someone was talking about budget cuts?

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

#77

Post by lambda »

yuhong wrote: post #4

"Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members." Wonder if it is referring to the Dual_EC_DRBG RNG.

Well, it goes on to say "Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency." The Dual_EC_DRBG vulnerability was revealed by two Microsoft researchers in 2007: http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf

So I'd say yes, it sounds like that's what they're talking about.

Speaking of which, I'm really quite frustrated how many of these recent reports about the NSA elide the technical details. You have to read between the lines to figure out what's really going on, what weaknesses there really are.

As a matter of security, it would be better to know specifically what vulnerabilities there really are. Merely the announcement of vulnerabilities can allow a dedicated black-hat to find and exploit it; but someone who's trying to secure their system, and isn't following cryptography incredibly closely, won't know what they need to do or change to make their systems more secure against these types of attacks.

There's a reason that the security community advocates for full disclosure (or at least responsible disclosure, if it's possible to selectively disclose to a few vendors so they can do a coordinated release that fixes the vulnerability before it becomes public), in which you completely disclose a vulnerability so people aren't left guessing about it.

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

#78

Post by reinmen »

abeinstein wrote: post #23

So, NSA has solved P vs NP and they're just not telling us?

assume the simplest explanation.

1) they have found/introduced a bug in encryption standards 2) they have solved a fiendishly hard math problem to which no known solution exists and on which solution there is a price of 1 mio $

working in dev i assume (1) is several orders of magnitude more likely.

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

#79

Post by electic »

gaius wrote: post #71
teleclimber wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

That's a false sense of security. You can inspect every line of code in SSL but unless you are a world-class cryptographer yourself, how will you spot a backdoor in the algorithm ?

It's a bit harder to sneak in junk in open source projects. You can see the checkins. However, you are right, if the flaw is in the algorithm itself, it's hopeless.

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

#80

Post by captainmojo »

untog wrote: post #64
electic wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://opencores.org/or1k/Main_Page
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