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While I personally wasn't around in the 90's, I believe we're yet to see anything on the level of the Clipper chip and nineties' crypto wars in general in the 2

by b4eEX 8y ago

While I personally wasn't around in the 90's, I believe we're yet to see anything on the level of the Clipper chip and nineties' crypto wars in general in the 21st century. Or maybe they've learned to hide their activities better, but that's a bit of a Russell's teapot.

monocasa 8y ago
Their diffie hellman hack, and router 0 days are everything they wanted out of the clipper chip.
- marnett 8y ago
  What diffie-hellman hack are you referring to? I'm curious.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/nsa-crack-encryption.html https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/nsa-crack-encryption.html https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy-ccs15.pdf https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy-ccs15.pdf Basically, for about $100M per prime (probs cheaper now), you can pre compute a big table that you can use to decrypt the diffie hellman exchange. From there you have the negotiated private keys, and you're off to the races for a full, real time decrypt. Since before the Snowden leaks, there wasn't the public thought that the choice of primes for diffie hellman mattered really for it's security, most implementations hardcoded the prime. Something like 92% of the top 1 million https sites were using the same 2 primes, and similar numbers of VPN and SSH implementations were vulnerable too. So for a one time cost of ~$200m the NSA was able to decrypt the vast majority of internet traffic as long as they caught the diffie hellman exchange at the beginning.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
In the Snowden leaks, BULLRUN said they were secretly weakening every cryptosystem they could even in standards. The Core Secrets leak also said the FBI was "compelling" U.S. companies to "SIGINT-enable" their systems in secret. The groups doing this also operate secretly with effective, criminal immunity. Such a situation is way worse than them pushing an obviously-backdoored chip that we could've all spotted and worked around.

by b4eEX 8y ago

monocasa 8y ago

Their diffie hellman hack, and router 0 days are everything they wanted out of the clipper chip.

marnett 8y ago
What diffie-hellman hack are you referring to? I'm curious.
- monocasa 8y ago
  https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/nsa-crack-encryption.html https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/nsa-crack-encryption.html https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy-ccs15.pdf https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy-ccs15.pdf Basically, for about $100M per prime (probs cheaper now), you can pre compute a big table that you can use to decrypt the diffie hellman exchange. From there you have the negotiated private keys, and you're off to the races for a full, real time decrypt. Since before the Snowden leaks, there wasn't the public thought that the choice of primes for diffie hellman mattered really for it's security, most implementations hardcoded the prime. Something like 92% of the top 1 million https sites were using the same 2 primes, and similar numbers of VPN and SSH implementations were vulnerable too. So for a one time cost of ~$200m the NSA was able to decrypt the vast majority of internet traffic as long as they caught the diffie hellman exchange at the beginning.

nickpsecurity 8y ago

In the Snowden leaks, BULLRUN said they were secretly weakening every cryptosystem they could even in standards. The Core Secrets leak also said the FBI was "compelling" U.S. companies to "SIGINT-enable" their systems in secret. The groups doing this also operate secretly with effective, criminal immunity. Such a situation is way worse than them pushing an obviously-backdoored chip that we could've all spotted and worked around.