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This has nothing to do with brain power. This was a deliberately backdoored algorithm that any cryptographer familiar with elliptic curve cryptography could've
by marcan_42 5y ago
This has nothing to do with brain power. This was a deliberately backdoored algorithm that any cryptographer familiar with elliptic curve cryptography could've come up with. It wasn't even good or clever, seeing as people saw through it almost immediately. The only thing it had going for it is it was plausibly deniable and that allowed the US government to force people to implement it, since nobody could prove the NSA really had the secret keys.
Stuff like this is, on the contrary, evidence that the NSA can't break modern cryptography. If they could, they wouldn't need to try to push through blatant backdoors like this.
If you want to be safe from the NSA, use well-vetted, simple, auditable cryptography tools. The NSA doesn't break real crypto any more, they just find or make software bugs.
The only "thing the NSA has probably broken" that comes to mind in the modern crypto world is when people realized that you could do a one time mass computation for fixed parameters for n-bit Diffie-Hellman and then use the result to decrypt any communications that that used them, efficiently... which was a bit of a problem when tons of software around the world was using default parameters, often 1024-bit, which is in "the NSA can almost certainly break it" range. I remember when that happened, I went through all my servers and re-generated my own dh parameters for OpenSSL, at 4096 bits. But this wasn't a particularly mind blowing idea, it was more like an "oh shit" moment since everyone knew the NSA had the storage/compute budget to actually carry out this attack. But anyone serious about crypto shouldn't have been using 1024-bit DH anyway; it was just a failure of the ecosystem that nobody had proactively deprecated such small sizes.
- sjaak 5y ago> Stuff like this is, on the contrary, evidence that the NSA can't break modern cryptography. Unless they're one step ahead here and they want us to think that which is why they add backdoors knowing that years later that knowledge will become public, giving us all a reason to think they cannot break modern crypto. <takes off his tinfoil hat>
- sangnoir 5y ago> The NSA doesn't break real crypto any more, they just find or make software bugs. They still can, and do break crypto. The Snowden papers (IIRC) mentioned that NSA factored a bunch of primes by throwing ridiculous amounts of compute at it: billions of dollars. With that,they could break schemes with no forward secrecy at their leisure (from all the historical internet traffic they had gathered), and they could decrypt ~30% of all "secure" internet connections in real time at the time,IIRC
- marcan_42 5y agoYou're describing the Diffie-Hellman story I mentioned (in a somewhat confusing way; forward secrecy isn't involved here, this isn't about breaking RSA TLS keys, and in fact DH is used in connections with forward secrecy). Again, that only works for 1024 bit DH schemes. The NSA can't factor 2048 bit keys, and they definitely can't factor 4096 bit keys. These aren't unknown capabilities; it's pretty easy to get an order of magnitude estimate on how much compute power the NSA has (spoiler alert: Google has more).
- sroussey 5y agoAnd vulnerabilities are constantly discovered, so they can go back to the recorded internet and break it.
- Y_Y 5y agoThat's easy when you know the secret. Give me any prime, as big as you like, and I'll factor it for you right now.