8 ms·

I’m actually comforted by the fact that NSA needed encryption turned off to spy.

by fiatpandas 1y ago

danielheath 1y ago
Or it was simply cheaper than cracking it.
- hx8 1y ago
  I was comforted by the idea that it is more expensive than $10m to crack encryption, but this was in 2013.
  - greenavocado 1y ago
    Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.35 billion cubic kilometers of water. To raise this entire volume from an average temperature of 3.5C to boiling (100 C), we'd need roughly: 1.35 x 10^21 kg x 4,184 J/(kg C) x 96.5C is approximately 5.45 x 10^25 joules That's 545 million exajoules or about 10,000 times humanity's annual energy consumption. If you tried to brute-force AES-256 with conventional computers, you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys. Even with a billion billion (10^18) attempts per second: 2^256 operations / 10^18 operations/second is approximately 10^59 seconds. You'd need about 2.7 x 10^41 universe lifetimes to crack AES-256 At about 10 watts per computer, this would require approximately 10^60 joules, or roughly 2 x 10^34 times the energy needed to boil the oceans. You could boil the oceans, refill them, and repeat this process 200 trillion trillion trillion times. For RSA-2048, the best classical algorithms would need about 2^112 operations. This would still require around 10^27 joules, or about 20 times what's needed to boil the oceans. ECC with a 256-bit key would need roughly 2^128 operations to crack, requiring approximately 10^31 joules It's enough to boil the oceans about 2,000 times over. Quantum computers could theoretically use Shor's algorithm to break RSA and ECC much faster. But to break RSA-2048, we'd need a fault-tolerant quantum computer with millions of qubits. Current quantum computers have fewer than 1,000 stable qubits. Even with quantum computing, the energy requirements would still be astronomical. Perhaps enough to boil all the oceans once or twice, rather than thousands of times.
    - gosub100 1y ago
      > you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys it's very unlikely you'd have to check the entire keyspace before you found it. On average it would be about half.
      - greenavocado 1y ago
        Is there a more efficient way? What's the state of the art?
        timschmidt 1y ago
        IDK, let's ask a mathematician. Oh, they all work for NSA.
        aaronbrethorst 1y ago
        Womp womp. https://therecord.media/nsa-to-cut-up-to-2000-roles-downsizing https://therecord.media/nsa-to-cut-up-to-2000-roles-downsizi...
        timschmidt 1y ago
        I like to tell myself that everyone at NSA is a fine upstanding patriot, and that the agency only ever does what is in the best interest of the American People, but that does feel naive at times. Like when they infiltrate international standards bodies to introduce backdoors. Is downsizing the NSA something we're upset about?
        akimbostrawman 1y ago
        It doesn't even really matter what character most of them have. Most information is on need to know basis for a reason so the one giving the orders can tell a tale about foreign terrorists while the grunts happily surveil the common man.
        1y ago
  - nullc 1y ago
    Wrong assumption. Lets imagine they could costslessly crack the encryption there. But as soon as they use any information gathered that way they risk leaking that they have this incredibly valuable capability. ... valuable and very fragile since people can easily change encryption schemes. Better to pay every party you need to to have boring vulnerabilities and security shortcomings, so that any information leak doesn't need a capabilities revealing explanation. So I think this gives you no information on their capabilities beyond bribing commercial players, which isn't exactly new. In the past (and presumably now) our intelligence apparatus has outright owned crypto/security companies in order to distribute backdoored technology. And of course they have, they're not prohibited, it's highly effective, they'd be incompetent not to.
    - bb88 1y ago
      But knowing still gives you an advantage, even if you can't use it legally -- because you can still use it illegally. LEO and Prosecutors will use "parallel construction" to construct a narrative about how information was obtained in a legal way even though it was clearly obtained illegally. Or you could choose to only act on 5% (e.g.) of the information gleaned -- and that which could clearly be shown to be leaked by a third party. Or say if you were tapping the information of a mob boss, you could leak the information to a competitor and let justice work it's way through the streets instead of the courts.
      - nullc 1y ago
        It's tricky, because you run the risk that any use risks disclosing the capability. Targets can even set traps. E.g. I caught irc opers spying on PMs by sending trap URLs where I secretly could see the access logs. Because great care was taken to make sure the URLs existed nowhere else when they got loaded it was a confirmation that the traffic was monitored. Now perhaps a somewhat safer tool is to just use the cracking to determine the best targets to bribe or backdoor, but only allow the group with the cracking power to give the names of services to monitor at any cost.
        bb88 1y ago
emmelaich 1y ago
You could leak the private key accidentally on purpose but that would be harder to plausibly deny involvement if that fact leaked.
deafpolygon 1y ago
I'm reminded of a certain XKCD comic[1]. The US government probably doesn't need to crack the encryption to get what they want. [1]: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
starspangled 1y ago
On the other hand it would be a very cheap counter espionage measure if a small stream of such payments was enough to convince China et al that the NSA had not broken encryption.

I’m actually comforted by the fact that NSA needed encryption turned off to spy.

danielheath 1y ago

Or it was simply cheaper than cracking it.

hx8 1y ago
I was comforted by the idea that it is more expensive than $10m to crack encryption, but this was in 2013.
- greenavocado 1y ago
  Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.35 billion cubic kilometers of water. To raise this entire volume from an average temperature of 3.5C to boiling (100 C), we'd need roughly: 1.35 x 10^21 kg x 4,184 J/(kg C) x 96.5C is approximately 5.45 x 10^25 joules That's 545 million exajoules or about 10,000 times humanity's annual energy consumption. If you tried to brute-force AES-256 with conventional computers, you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys. Even with a billion billion (10^18) attempts per second: 2^256 operations / 10^18 operations/second is approximately 10^59 seconds. You'd need about 2.7 x 10^41 universe lifetimes to crack AES-256 At about 10 watts per computer, this would require approximately 10^60 joules, or roughly 2 x 10^34 times the energy needed to boil the oceans. You could boil the oceans, refill them, and repeat this process 200 trillion trillion trillion times. For RSA-2048, the best classical algorithms would need about 2^112 operations. This would still require around 10^27 joules, or about 20 times what's needed to boil the oceans. ECC with a 256-bit key would need roughly 2^128 operations to crack, requiring approximately 10^31 joules It's enough to boil the oceans about 2,000 times over. Quantum computers could theoretically use Shor's algorithm to break RSA and ECC much faster. But to break RSA-2048, we'd need a fault-tolerant quantum computer with millions of qubits. Current quantum computers have fewer than 1,000 stable qubits. Even with quantum computing, the energy requirements would still be astronomical. Perhaps enough to boil all the oceans once or twice, rather than thousands of times.
  - gosub100 1y ago
    > you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys it's very unlikely you'd have to check the entire keyspace before you found it. On average it would be about half.
    - greenavocado 1y ago
      Is there a more efficient way? What's the state of the art?
      - timschmidt 1y ago
        IDK, let's ask a mathematician. Oh, they all work for NSA.
        aaronbrethorst 1y ago
        Womp womp. https://therecord.media/nsa-to-cut-up-to-2000-roles-downsizing https://therecord.media/nsa-to-cut-up-to-2000-roles-downsizi...
        timschmidt 1y ago
        I like to tell myself that everyone at NSA is a fine upstanding patriot, and that the agency only ever does what is in the best interest of the American People, but that does feel naive at times. Like when they infiltrate international standards bodies to introduce backdoors. Is downsizing the NSA something we're upset about?
        akimbostrawman 1y ago
        It doesn't even really matter what character most of them have. Most information is on need to know basis for a reason so the one giving the orders can tell a tale about foreign terrorists while the grunts happily surveil the common man.
        1y ago
- nullc 1y ago
  Wrong assumption. Lets imagine they could costslessly crack the encryption there. But as soon as they use any information gathered that way they risk leaking that they have this incredibly valuable capability. ... valuable and very fragile since people can easily change encryption schemes. Better to pay every party you need to to have boring vulnerabilities and security shortcomings, so that any information leak doesn't need a capabilities revealing explanation. So I think this gives you no information on their capabilities beyond bribing commercial players, which isn't exactly new. In the past (and presumably now) our intelligence apparatus has outright owned crypto/security companies in order to distribute backdoored technology. And of course they have, they're not prohibited, it's highly effective, they'd be incompetent not to.
  - bb88 1y ago
    But knowing still gives you an advantage, even if you can't use it legally -- because you can still use it illegally. LEO and Prosecutors will use "parallel construction" to construct a narrative about how information was obtained in a legal way even though it was clearly obtained illegally. Or you could choose to only act on 5% (e.g.) of the information gleaned -- and that which could clearly be shown to be leaked by a third party. Or say if you were tapping the information of a mob boss, you could leak the information to a competitor and let justice work it's way through the streets instead of the courts.
    - nullc 1y ago
      It's tricky, because you run the risk that any use risks disclosing the capability. Targets can even set traps. E.g. I caught irc opers spying on PMs by sending trap URLs where I secretly could see the access logs. Because great care was taken to make sure the URLs existed nowhere else when they got loaded it was a confirmation that the traffic was monitored. Now perhaps a somewhat safer tool is to just use the cracking to determine the best targets to bribe or backdoor, but only allow the group with the cracking power to give the names of services to monitor at any cost.
      - bb88 1y ago

emmelaich 1y ago

You could leak the private key accidentally on purpose but that would be harder to plausibly deny involvement if that fact leaked.

deafpolygon 1y ago

I'm reminded of a certain XKCD comic[1]. The US government probably doesn't need to crack the encryption to get what they want. [1]: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/

starspangled 1y ago

On the other hand it would be a very cheap counter espionage measure if a small stream of such payments was enough to convince China et al that the NSA had not broken encryption.