4 ms·
Knowing how absurdly insecure any civilian consumer system is (laptop, smart phone, home assistant, self driving car), with zero day fire-and-not-a-drill-at-all
by evntllyCnsistnt 8y ago
Knowing how absurdly insecure any civilian consumer system is (laptop, smart phone, home assistant, self driving car), with zero day fire-and-not-a-drill-at-all advisories, pretty much every month, I don’t get how this sort of thing happens.
I also fail to see how a decision like this could be made:
The CIA had imported the system
from its Middle East operations...
To China? The degree of technical differences between those two regions is so intuitively disparate, that without having been to either, I’d still never estimate that a game plan for one would work in the other.
Cell phones make sense in desert territories with good satellite coverage, and attacking, as much as operating those same cell phones makes sense too, in a volatile atmosphere.
Meanwhile, in China, with world class supercomputing facilities operated at scientific research institutions, one can only safely assume that no amount of cryptography or electronic transmission is safe. Not even one-time pads.
Each seems like it’s own game, with it’s own rules. What a mistake to not approach them differently. It’s like trying to steal cars from a suburban driveway at dinner time, versus a city parking garage during rush hour. A car is not simply a thing with wheels, that rolls away as soon as you can hop inside.
- pertymcpert 8y agoHow could one time pads be broken?
- wowzerz 8y agoNo one really tries to break encryption, when side channel attacks can capture a message during the process of encryption. No one thinks in encrypted text. The plain text is always created and then translated over to the enciphered copy. The plain text will always exist in some way, so that a message may be proof-read before sending. Even if printed on the sceen of a secure display monitor. If an environment is stifling enough, it might be painfully obvious that someone is stepping out of line to work on carefully disclosing secrets. Obviously laws don’t matter in China, and if there’s a scent of dishonesty in the wrong context, I’m sure it wouldn’t take much find a way to watch every second of someone’s humble existence, if they’re not above executing pregnant women to send a message about what not watching your husband gets you.
- secfirstmd 8y agoWhat direct cryptographic attack do you know that works on a one time pad? (Aslong as the randomness used to build it is real, it is implemented properly and not re-used etc)
- kharms 8y agoYou don't need to break the code, just notice a pattern of use/behavior.
- wowzerz 8y agoUser error, for one. People get sloppy and reuse a not-so-one-time-pad. That alone compromises secrets with frequency analysis.
- secfirstmd 8y agoYeah that's obvious and telling me what I already know and pointed out. I thought there was some other cryptographic issue.
- wowzerz 8y agoWell, what's the point in asking, if you already know everything? I wonder.