2 ms·

There is no evidence indicating that anyone can break encryption for mail servers using STARTTLS.

Karunamon 10y ago
Not right now, no. But if you start saving encrypted streams, and then come back to them 10 years later when, perhaps, a TLS vulnerability is found...
- willstrafach 10y ago
  I don't know what the media coverage stated, but the source material indicates that full-take is only stored in a 5 day rolling buffer. I believe 30-day for certain flagged selectors. Not at all indefinite, that is not possible.
  - hendersoon 10y ago
    As of 2011, GCHQ stored their full-take for 3 days and metadata for 30 days. Do you believe they haven't increased capacity in the past 6 years? Again, the discussion comes down to evidence versus reasoned speculation. Evidence of intelligence agency activity is generally pretty tough to come by.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      I'd also believe the country's data transmission volume has increased in the same timeframe, and given how IOT is rapidly scaling up, probably a lot faster than storage capacity.
      - hendersoon 10y ago
        They have techniques to reduce the data corpus, called "massive volume reduction" or MVR in the GCHQ "Mastering the Internet" rather pompously named leak. It discards junk traffic and assumedly does deduplication, etc. Remember, Tempora went online in 2011, 6 years ago. Techniques have certainly been refined since. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secre... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-mastering-the-internet https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-mastering-th...
        Karunamon 10y ago
        But we're talking encrypted streams here. No algorithm, real or imagined, can dedupe or compress random noise.
    - willstrafach 10y ago
      Additional data intake would greatly increase costs as well. I guess I'm not fully understanding, is the implication that getting more data would lead to more useful information? From reading the source documentation itself (not editorialized coverage), it seems they are already swimming in almost too much data. Their focus is much more likely to be aimed at data refinement at this point, as adding even more data would make it far more difficult for analysts to do their job.
      - hendersoon 10y ago
        It absolutely will NOT be more useful! That's one of the main takeaways from Snowden's leaks-- mass surveillance does not make us safer. Thing is, the three-letter agencies strongly disagree.
bdamm 10y ago
It is unlikely that many servers are strong enough to resist penetration and theft of the mail server's private key. That key then can be indexed and matched as well. Is your mail server refusing downgrades to non-PFS ciphers? Is your kernel not affected by zero-days leaking the state of your secure random pool? Are there vulnerabilities in openssl we don't know about but collection agencies do? Is the reason that the government hasn't announced the CNSA Suite yet because the NSA is busy taking advantage of EC weaknesses combined with quantum computing capability? To say nothing of various direct TLS attacks, which are easy enough to translate from HTTP to SMTP, are agencies putting these to work? How far does the integration of passive collection and active attack go these days - there's plenty of evidence to indicate they have been significantly combined in the past. To say there is no evidence that anyone can break a TLS session is a bit like denying climate change.
- willstrafach 10y ago
  > To say there is no evidence that anyone can break a TLS session is a bit like denying climate change. None of what you have stated is evidence, and nothing from the leaked Snowden material is evidence. I did not say that they cannot do it as I have no way of knowing that, only said there is no actual evidence at all, so this devolves into "what-ifs" which lead to helplessness. I do not see how that is good for anyone.
  - randomworkacc 10y ago
    > "...and nothing from the leaked Snowden material is evidence." RNG

Not right now, no. But if you start saving encrypted streams, and then come back to them 10 years later when, perhaps, a TLS vulnerability is found...

willstrafach 10y ago
I don't know what the media coverage stated, but the source material indicates that full-take is only stored in a 5 day rolling buffer. I believe 30-day for certain flagged selectors. Not at all indefinite, that is not possible.
- hendersoon 10y ago
  As of 2011, GCHQ stored their full-take for 3 days and metadata for 30 days. Do you believe they haven't increased capacity in the past 6 years? Again, the discussion comes down to evidence versus reasoned speculation. Evidence of intelligence agency activity is generally pretty tough to come by.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    I'd also believe the country's data transmission volume has increased in the same timeframe, and given how IOT is rapidly scaling up, probably a lot faster than storage capacity.
    - hendersoon 10y ago
      They have techniques to reduce the data corpus, called "massive volume reduction" or MVR in the GCHQ "Mastering the Internet" rather pompously named leak. It discards junk traffic and assumedly does deduplication, etc. Remember, Tempora went online in 2011, 6 years ago. Techniques have certainly been refined since. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secre... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-mastering-the-internet https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-mastering-th...
      - Karunamon 10y ago
        But we're talking encrypted streams here. No algorithm, real or imagined, can dedupe or compress random noise.
  - willstrafach 10y ago
    Additional data intake would greatly increase costs as well. I guess I'm not fully understanding, is the implication that getting more data would lead to more useful information? From reading the source documentation itself (not editorialized coverage), it seems they are already swimming in almost too much data. Their focus is much more likely to be aimed at data refinement at this point, as adding even more data would make it far more difficult for analysts to do their job.
    - hendersoon 10y ago
      It absolutely will NOT be more useful! That's one of the main takeaways from Snowden's leaks-- mass surveillance does not make us safer. Thing is, the three-letter agencies strongly disagree.

bdamm 10y ago

It is unlikely that many servers are strong enough to resist penetration and theft of the mail server's private key. That key then can be indexed and matched as well. Is your mail server refusing downgrades to non-PFS ciphers? Is your kernel not affected by zero-days leaking the state of your secure random pool? Are there vulnerabilities in openssl we don't know about but collection agencies do? Is the reason that the government hasn't announced the CNSA Suite yet because the NSA is busy taking advantage of EC weaknesses combined with quantum computing capability? To say nothing of various direct TLS attacks, which are easy enough to translate from HTTP to SMTP, are agencies putting these to work? How far does the integration of passive collection and active attack go these days - there's plenty of evidence to indicate they have been significantly combined in the past. To say there is no evidence that anyone can break a TLS session is a bit like denying climate change.

willstrafach 10y ago
> To say there is no evidence that anyone can break a TLS session is a bit like denying climate change. None of what you have stated is evidence, and nothing from the leaked Snowden material is evidence. I did not say that they cannot do it as I have no way of knowing that, only said there is no actual evidence at all, so this devolves into "what-ifs" which lead to helplessness. I do not see how that is good for anyone.
- randomworkacc 10y ago
  > "...and nothing from the leaked Snowden material is evidence." RNG