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Breaking pgp like encryption would require a huge mathematical breakthrough in how prime numbers work and their discovery. It would also require unknown math ge

Breaking pgp like encryption would require a huge mathematical breakthrough in how prime numbers work and their discovery. It would also require unknown math geniuses to work for said secret department which is unlikely, most of the best mathematical geniuses are already known and tend to work at universities/public research/private research and publish their work there. Not saying this is impossible but it's really highly unlikely borderline crazy conspiracy. Also, the fact that most governments tend to hack at the pre-encryption level and use social engineering to hack devices on encrypted networks kind of confirms they do not have the capability to break encryption.

SAI_Peregrinus 10y ago
The NSA is the single largest employer of mathematicians in the US. The Snowden leaks did not include any of the data from the departments actually involved in attacking cryptography. All we really know is that they don't have any breaks for their low-level mass surveillance tools. Likewise with the CIA. From the 1% of the documents leaked so far, there's no evidence that they have the ability to crack modern encryption. But the documents leaked seem to come from a contractor (or were shared with a contractor) so there are likely internal-use-only tools with greater capability than shown in this leak. That's not to say that they definitely have ways to break modern crypto, just that we can't prove that they don't given the material publicly known so far.
- TillE 10y ago
  It's fairly difficult to do anything useful with ultra-secret magic decryption tools. You can passively observe, but taking any action, even subtle indirect action, means you're eventually going to alert a target to your capabilities. Anyway, these are extraordinarily difficult problems which may not have good solutions outside of quantum computing. You can throw all the smart people and computing power in the world at a problem and still come up with almost nothing.

SAI_Peregrinus 10y ago

The NSA is the single largest employer of mathematicians in the US. The Snowden leaks did not include any of the data from the departments actually involved in attacking cryptography. All we really know is that they don't have any breaks for their low-level mass surveillance tools. Likewise with the CIA. From the 1% of the documents leaked so far, there's no evidence that they have the ability to crack modern encryption. But the documents leaked seem to come from a contractor (or were shared with a contractor) so there are likely internal-use-only tools with greater capability than shown in this leak. That's not to say that they definitely have ways to break modern crypto, just that we can't prove that they don't given the material publicly known so far.

TillE 10y ago
It's fairly difficult to do anything useful with ultra-secret magic decryption tools. You can passively observe, but taking any action, even subtle indirect action, means you're eventually going to alert a target to your capabilities. Anyway, these are extraordinarily difficult problems which may not have good solutions outside of quantum computing. You can throw all the smart people and computing power in the world at a problem and still come up with almost nothing.