91–100 of 395 posts
Is there anything unusual about the cipher options offered by NSA/GCHQ servers? Or any recent changes at The NYTimes or Guardian's servers.
So does this means they have broken or fund a bug in RSA, fast enough computers to brute force or solved the P versus NP problem. In decreasing chances of possibility. I am also an encryption noob, so I gather that if they have broken a crypto then my 4096 bit files will be no more secure than 1024 bit ones. Right?
If they solved P vs NP... well. Yeah. That would be interesting.
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…
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?
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…
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)?
1) Site sends public key certificate to browser. 2) Browser verifies certificate against in-browser store. 3) Browser extracts public key from certificate. 4) Browser generates symmetric/private key. 5) Browser encrypts that symmetric key with the site's public key. 6) Browser sends encrypted symmetric key to site. 7) Site decrypts symmetric key with its private key (the one associated with its public key certificate) 8) Site and browser encrypt and decrypt data using the privately shared symmetric key.
If I break the public key algorithm(s) used in SSL, I break all of that. But we think that's tough (as in NP hard).
If I break SSL itself (find flaws in negotiation, etc.) I might be able to break all of that. That's been done a few times (SSL v1.0 is garbage; v2.0 is borked; v3.0 a little broken; only TLS 1.2 is borkless, so far. As far as we know.
If I break the symmetric algorithm(s), then I can get at the data without breaking SSL itself. But we think that's tough, too. As far as we know.
If any of the software used in any of the above is borked, then usable attack vectors may be exist. Or not. We don't know until we find them.
It's a complex box of moving parts with many potential attack vectors, many potential vulnerabilities, etc.
Who really knows if the NSA might have found a multi-vector, multi-vulnerability attack that allows them to get at a lot of encrypted data without having broken all of any one of those things.
It's purest speculation until someone with a sufficient clearance and sufficient need-to-know decides to speak out, and even then it would remain unconfirmed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This 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? ---- [Edit 1] Some speculation: By careful hardware design --…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/28/us-usa-security-fr...
> 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…
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 ?
Perhaps I lack the wherewithal to identify security vulnerabilities in deployed code, but there's a good chance that there are others who are able to spot said vulns.
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.