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NOBUS (Nobody but Us)
- saagarjha 7y ago> If there's a vulnerability here that weakens encryption but you still need four acres of Cray computers in the basement in order to work it you kind of think "NOBUS" and that's a vulnerability we are not ethically or legally compelled to try to patch – it's one that ethically and legally we could try to exploit in order to keep Americans safe from others. Not sure about the law, but I'd say that assuming that nobody else has that kind of computing power is quite arrogant, and it's certainly not "ethical" to keep it undisclosed…
- derefr 7y agoI don't know about arrogant; when you're a state actor, you have available things like a detailed infrared map of the entire Earth, order flow from every chip fab, power figures for all extant power plants with attempted "balancing of the books" against all above-board known uses of that power, etc. Because of this, it might be unclear exactly what a rival power is doing with all that heat and power and all those chips, but it's very easy to know that they're doing something. And, therefore, very easy to know when you're "ahead", in terms of nowhere else on Earth showing the right MASINT signature to represent the same compute capacity you have. Mind you, this is commutative; the Russians, Chinese, and other powers with satellite networks can take the same infrared imagery, and do the same maths, to calculate exactly how much more compute the NSA has than they do; and their OPSEC doctrine is necessarily designed around this knowledge.
- joe_the_user 7y agoWould this NSA capability tell them how much compute capacity China has as result of being the world center of bitcoin mining? Would it tell them whether this capability could repurposed? Also, can any actor be certain distributed compute capacity can't be harnessed in the fashion of concentrated capacity? How many GPUs does is take to make a Cray, etc?
- peteretep 7y ago> Would this NSA capability tell them how much compute capacity China has as result of being the world center of bitcoin mining? Would it tell them whether this capability could repurposed? I suspect the answer is yes, and also that they monitor bitcoin mining rates to see if large bitcoin miners in adversarial countries suddenly disappear.
- starfallg 7y agoGiven that you can buy these Bitcoin miners and they are specialised ASICs for calculating SHA256 hashes in a specific way to find the first acceptable nonce, it's unlikely that Bitcoin mining hardware can be repurposed in this way.
- oarsinsync 7y agoCorrect. The vast majority of bitcoin miners are specialised ASICs for calculating BTC related hashes explicitly, and nothing else. Optimised for efficiency of the task at hand.
- mr__y 7y agoOn the other hand a manufacturer capable of designing and producing SHA-256 chips could be also capable of designing and manufacturing $other_commonly_used_hash_algo chips allowing for brute-forcing $other_commonly_used_hash_algo encoded passwords. The same manufacturer/design team could also probably prepare $popular_block_cipher chips. So, while BTC miner chips would not be useful themselves, having an industry capable of creating those chips is.
- hinkley 7y agoI never really thought about this before, but a thermodynamics breakthrough in power supply design, heat management, or power generation could qualify as a state secret. We know that the NSA makes custom chips, and it's probably harder to know how many calculations per second that hardware can manage than predicting the capacity of COTS hardware based on how hot the building is and how hot the nearest powerplant is getting. One of the things I loved about the history of the Blackbird is that it held the record for fastest plane, and when a new pretender to the throne arrived, on a couple different occasions they sent up another Blackbird pilot and retook the crown. When a private individual breaks a record, they tend to go as fast as they can. Bragging rights for an military airplane are "mine is faster than yours" not "mine is exactly this much faster than yours". Just keep that classified.
- pinewurst 7y agoNote https://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/nsa/sta.pdf https://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/nsa/sta.pdf promising ~100Ghz cryogenic processors by 2010 with sufficient (but seemingly not ridiculous) government investment.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sterlind 7y agoFascinating. I see three possibilities: 1. the project succeeded and the government has kept cryogenic processors totally dark for a decade with no public leaks or hints to industry (far-fetched, though Skunkworks hid the Blackbird pretty well.) 2. they aggressively funded it as a black project but hit insurmountable design challenges (like quantum computers) or bureaucratic abyss (like the F35.) 3. the funding never materialized. are any research teams working on superconducting classical computers, rather than quantum computers? does nonlinearity get in the way?
- mr__y 7y ago4. Attempts to create cryogenic CPUs were made well before 2005 and failed. The project was made somewhat public in order to misdirect adversaries into spending their budget and efforts on cryogenic processors. 5. The project was funded as a black project without the intention to actually deliver results but rather to justify RSFQ circuits R&D to later use those results elsewhere
- xscott 7y ago> I don't know about arrogant Does Google or Amazon have enough compute power to compete with the NSA? My guess would be yes. They certainly have a good cover story if they were interested in using it for exploits. :-)
- ixtli 7y agoThey’re profit driven though so they have no ability to focus more than a fraction of their resources on a single problem. What makes governments powerful at solving problems is the ability to justify larger expenditures. EDIT: to be clear when I say “no ability” I mean practically. Obviously they COULD put all employees on a single problem but they simply won’t.
- xscott 7y ago> Obviously they COULD put all employees on a single problem but they simply won’t. It wasn't all employees, but all servers, that I was thinking about.
- ixtli 7y agoyeah after the fact i realized i should have specified this. i should have just said "capital" because in our society it's all interchangeable because everything (time, resources, etc.) is related to its dollar cost
- derefr 7y agoCompanies operating legally under governments, are much more transparent to states (any state, not just the one they exist under) than other states are, because they interact through markets rather than through handshake deals. Amazon and Google have "public APIs" that they get all their chips through, and the NSA can see the "API calls." :) On the other hand, this is exactly the reason that entities that do operate through handshake deals with no visible economic activity—organized crime and the zaibatsu/chaebol type of conglomerate—tend to be considered imminent threats to states. They're opaque to logistical analysis! (Not that your average mob boss would have any inherent reason to commit treason against the United States, but other nations might be rather motivated to give them extrinsic reasons.) For this reason, even "benign" domestic crime syndicates or conglomerates will have their intelligence opacity hacked through with the application of good old-fashioned HUMINT.
- ohhhhhh 7y agohttps://patents.google.com/patent/US20190058105A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190058105A1/en
- hinkley 7y agoI don't remember where I got this threat model, but I think it was Applied Cryptography. Paraphrased, is your system safe against: an individual hacker, a group, a corporation, a city-state, a nation, a superpower? Are any of the ones you said 'no' to ever likely to give a damn about your software or data? Then botnets became a thing. Suddenly individuals or small groups could have more resources than a city-state, and every year they just got bigger and bigger. If it's only computing resources that save you (as implied by that quote), that barrier isn't what it used to be. Sophistication of some other kind is the only protection and hubris can kill that off pretty quick too.
- ses1984 7y agoIndividuals with access to giant botnets tend not to blow it on soft targets. I think it's reasonable to build systems that are resistant to attacks up to but not including the superpower level. The worst part is the human factor. The more people involved, the easier it is to compromise one of those people.
- samcheng 7y agoIt probably wasn't unjustifiably arrogant back in the 90's. The article mentions evidence that this supremacy is no longer true, but doesn't actually cite any evidence. I suppose they are alluding to private companies (mostly American but quite transnational), and also the Chinese government. Both likely have the kind of talent + computing infrastructure to challenge the NSA. Do people like Palantir or Google exploit 0-days with the same NOBUS attitude?
- peteretep 7y ago> I'd say that assuming that nobody else has that kind of computing power is quite arrogant Maybe, but there's also probably a team of very smart people whose job it is to consider all of the information and make that call on a case-by-case basis. I'm sure they get it wrong sometimes, but I'd also imagine they get it right most of the time. > it's certainly not "ethical" to keep it undisclosed Sure, but by that ethical posture nothing the NSA does is ethical. If you accept as ethical the NSA's mission of protecting Americans at the expense of other humans, this particular method seems pretty ethical.
- Sean1708 7y agoNot to mention that the idea that the US is the one good country and must be protected to the detriment of all other countries is massively unethical IMO.
- LatteLazy 7y agoIsn't the point that they know with a high degree of certainty who is buying large amounts of the sort of computer equipment needed for this? Cray will let them know if the People's Liberation Army places an order for an acre of kit. I agree about the ethical requirement,but between surveillance and torture, they're well beyond the point of ethical discussion so.
- andrewflnr 7y agoI've wondered occasionally if Rijndael was chosen over the other AES finalists so that the NSA would have a NOBUS backdoor in the form of the whole s-box timing side channel thing. Is there any good info/commentary on that possibility?
- ggm 7y agoIts impossible to prove absent a snowden-class leak. The premise is they have secret knowledge. Maths is inductive reasoning, they might have a non-inductive insight into a thing which exposes a magic key to them, but they have to do a risk analysis the bad guys (tm) can do the same AHA moment and secure the same advantage. In this space, I feel about the only public evidence would be when the NSA feel the protocol cannot be trusted for government use, where the primary risk is other-state actors. I also feel the blurring of the role for the agencies here does nobody any favours. NOBUS confers a specific advantage which massively undermines your own position in the longer term for tactical advantage now. I would probably be told by wiser heads tactics trumps strategy, but when you face 20-50 year relationships and you burned your partners 15 years ago, that tactical win can be a bit of a problem. The UK did this with Enigma: kept their insight secret and handed the captured units to the commonwealth governments. They did not help their own cause in the 1960s independence wars, trust was close to zero. I have no evidence the ability to decrypt their signals helped or hindered btw. Its conjecture on my part.
- badrabbit 7y agoCould they simply use a different sbox? Or can specific implementations be written to avoid the vuln? You have to also keep in mind,aes is class-b crypto, the only publicly known class-a ciphers are decades older than aes.
- alephnil 7y agoThe sbox is a part of the definition of AES. If you change it it is no longer AES, and the new algorithm (that may well have vulnerabilities) is no longer compatible with the cryptographic protocols that specifies that they use AES as a cipher.
- gHosts 7y agoSort like the short bus, but shorter.
- zzo38computer 7y agoCan you write deceptive messages in order to try to determine what kind of messages the government can decrypt?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- closeparen 7y agoTaking great care to avoid revealing your capabilities has been integral to spycraft for a long time.
- ryacko 7y agolooks at the history of major criminal conspiracy cases and historical events The answer is throwing everything you have, and only some of the time reveal what you know.
- badrabbit 7y agoThat's why parallel reconsruction is a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoThis is a term everyone should know. It’s not just to protect technology. It’s used to launder what would otherwise be unconstitutional spying. This is effectively what we’re learning the government does through its FVEY[1] “partnerships”. Can’t spy on a US citizen? Have our neighbor do it and pass it back to us! 1. https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/nsa-global-surveillance-sigint-seniors/ https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/nsa-global-surveillance-...
- ngcc_hk 7y agoIf it is war there is ... And if you inform everyone that they have vulnerabilities not only that is security leakage it is a kind of security commerical activities without pay. But nobody it is not. You have Russia and totalitarian china. ... the world is not pure and black And white. The wiki writing is too bias. And too political correct based on the wrong assumption.
- Fnoord 7y agoI was thinking about NOBUS in relation to the NSA's finding of a critical security vulnerability in Windows 10 / 2016 [1]. Ie. "how it at least does not apply right now." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048633
- LockAndLol 7y agoSounds a bit pretentious. Pride comes before the fall.
- deadbunny 7y agoI was reading thinking NOBUS does sound a lot like HUBRIS.