3 ms·

I've always assumed that they have backdoors into all of the publicly common crytography protocols so they are effectively violating Moore's law (by not having

by gsibble 14y ago

I've always assumed that they have backdoors into all of the publicly common crytography protocols so they are effectively violating Moore's law (by not having to brute-force). Remember, it was the NSA that designed most of them to begin with and still hires the best of the best to continue the work. It's also probably a lot easier to just tap into everything and record it for later decryption if necessary than try to target various networks or systems individually.

manicbovine 14y ago
Well it depends on what you mean by backdoor. Just to pick one... let's take AES. There are a lot of open-source implementations, depending on your platform. Almost all of them are open-source [0]. Furthermore, AES is based on the Rijndael cipher [1], which is simply a mathematical process that an undergrad could understand and implement. Ignoring the fact that the major implementations have been poured over and audited by many researchers (and that you could do the same), it'd be just too risky to put a backdoor into an open implementation. It might be possible that the NSA has discovered some side-channel attack [2]. If that's what you mean by backdoor, then I suppose you could be right. (Perhaps every CPU has been manufactured so as to facilitate timing attacks.) I still think that the probabilities combine to some astronomically low number because those attacks still take time, and I don't think they have the computational ability to simultaneously run attacks against any very large subset of the US population. I don't trust secret, unaccountable organizations... but it just seems too extraordinary to imagine that any organization could actively monitor billions (millions, even) of communication streams at a time. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_implementations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_implementations [1] http://csrc.nist.gov/archive/aes/rijndael/Rijndael-ammended.pdf#page=1 http://csrc.nist.gov/archive/aes/rijndael/Rijndael-ammended.... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attacks
danielweber 14y ago
For DES, NSA proposed new S-box values that turned out to be better at resisting differential cryptoanalysis -- and differential cryptanalysis would not be discovered by people outside the NSA for years. Maybe this is just how masterfully deceitful they are.

by gsibble 14y ago

manicbovine 14y ago

Well it depends on what you mean by backdoor. Just to pick one... let's take AES. There are a lot of open-source implementations, depending on your platform. Almost all of them are open-source [0]. Furthermore, AES is based on the Rijndael cipher [1], which is simply a mathematical process that an undergrad could understand and implement. Ignoring the fact that the major implementations have been poured over and audited by many researchers (and that you could do the same), it'd be just too risky to put a backdoor into an open implementation. It might be possible that the NSA has discovered some side-channel attack [2]. If that's what you mean by backdoor, then I suppose you could be right. (Perhaps every CPU has been manufactured so as to facilitate timing attacks.) I still think that the probabilities combine to some astronomically low number because those attacks still take time, and I don't think they have the computational ability to simultaneously run attacks against any very large subset of the US population. I don't trust secret, unaccountable organizations... but it just seems too extraordinary to imagine that any organization could actively monitor billions (millions, even) of communication streams at a time. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_implementations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_implementations [1] http://csrc.nist.gov/archive/aes/rijndael/Rijndael-ammended.pdf#page=1 http://csrc.nist.gov/archive/aes/rijndael/Rijndael-ammended.... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attacks

danielweber 14y ago

For DES, NSA proposed new S-box values that turned out to be better at resisting differential cryptoanalysis -- and differential cryptanalysis would not be discovered by people outside the NSA for years. Maybe this is just how masterfully deceitful they are.