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It is magical. There is a magic 36000-core (?) computer that has been running for years (?). Well no, the paper just invents it. On the hearsay that an "anonymo
by PlzSnow 11y ago
It is magical. There is a magic 36000-core (?) computer that has been running for years (?). Well no, the paper just invents it. On the hearsay that an "anonymous nsa official" said they'd cracked something.
It astonishes me that people are running about like rabbits in a headlight on such flimsy nonsense.
But I understand. It makes us feel important. The new James Bond movie is coming out. And imagine! We're like a superhero secret agent. We can protect from the big bad government by increasing all the keys to 2048 bits! And we get to feel special and important.
Sigh.
- schoen 11y agoPeople who protect other people's communications security are special and important.
- alwillis 11y agoFrom the paper: With standard transistor costs and utilization, this would cost about $2 per chip to manufacture, after fixed design and tape-out costs of roughly $2M [32]. This suggests that an $8M investment would buy enough ASICs to complete the DH-1024 sieving precomputation in one year. $8 million is pocket change for the NSA, who's estimated yearly budget is around $10 billion.
- alwillis 11y agoClassified documents published by Der Spiegel [46] indicate that NSA is passively decrypting IPsec connections at significant scale. The documents do not describe the crypt- analytic techniques used, but they do provide an overview of the attack system architecture. Due to the Snowden leaks, we know the NSA is doing something that they haven't been able to do previously. The paper just explains, given what we know today, how this is plausible. There's nothing magical about that.