4 ms·
I don't get it, unless Snowden's published his public key somewhere and Wired has some really, really important information for him?
by drivebyacct2 13y ago
I don't get it, unless Snowden's published his public key somewhere and Wired has some really, really important information for him?
- msandford 13y agoMore likely that it's a publicity stunt, raising awareness of strong encryption that the NSA (probably) can't crack yet.
- caycep 13y agoyeah, I was wondering about how strong GPG was. Back in the day, i.e. the 90's, the assumption was it would take years for then-current NSA supercomputers to factor the keys. Nowadays, with all sorts of new attacks, analyses, and cheap as hell compute time, I would wager that time requirement has gone significantly down.
- teraflop 13y agoAFAIK, the current publicly-known record for breaking RSA keys is the factorization of RSA-768 in 2010: http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/006.pdf http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/006.pdf That paper says it took about 1500 CPU-years to break a 768-bit key, and that the difficulty increases 1000x for each additional 256 bits of key length. For a back-of-the-envelope cost estimate, I'm going to assume that there have been no major theoretical breakthroughs in the last couple of years, and that the machines they used were roughly equivalent to an EC2 "medium" instance. That puts the cost of breaking a 768-bit key, using spot instances for cost-efficiency, at about US$200k. That sounds small, but encryption/decryption are still reasonably efficient with larger keys, while factorization becomes vastly harder. Breaking a 2048-bit key would take something like 200 quadrillion dollars worth of CPU time. A 4096-bit key, like the one used for this message, would be vastly more secure than that.
- donrhummy 13y agoAssuming there's no known exploit. The NSA might know of an exploit for that algorithm.
- chinpokomon 13y agoMaybe the message is another encrypted message with a different algorithm?
- nknighthb 13y agoAt the moment, the NSA still permits use of 2048-bit RSA for classified information up to SECRET. It would be highly questionable for them to do so if they knew of easily exploitable weaknesses, as they're taking the chance that other governments won't find them. Remember, the NSA's mandate is twofold: They are a signals intelligence agency, but they are also charged with protecting government communications, much of which occur with commercially-available cryptography. RSA does make people nervous for some valid reasons, and that's why there's a gradual transition to ECC underway, but there's little reason to expect a practical attack on RSA at 2048+ bits in the near term. Absent an operational error on the part of Wired or Snowden, I seriously doubt the NSA will be decrypting that message in Snowden's lifetime, and almost certainly not before changes in the political climate.
- doublepop 13y agoThat's not the only form of "exploit" http://www.scip.ch/en/?vuldb.2721 http://www.scip.ch/en/?vuldb.2721
- nknighthb 13y agoUh, the existence of a buffer overflow (which doesn't even cause disclosure of an encrypted message) has nothing to do with the strength of the RSA algorithm, which is what the comment I replied to was talking about.
- doublepop 13y ago
- joeyh 13y agoI remember 768 bit asymetric keys in the mid 90's, and the paranoid had perhaps a 1024 bit key (I'm not very paranoid, and I got a 2048 bit key before 2000). A 768 bit RSA key was factored in 2009; the NSA could probably do it earlier. The default now is 2048 bits, and the key used by Wired is 4096 bits. That's a lot of doublings of the difficulty to brute force a key. 2^3328 increase in difficulty.
- jlgreco 13y agoRSA factoring does not increase with keysize increases like you might expect. Factoring, while still very hard, is much better than brute-force and continues to see improvements.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoHm, unfortunate that those who know what it is will recognize it and not think that and the rest will be confused and close the tab and move on. And the comments (on the Wired article) aren't remotely helpful.
- kyboren 13y agoSnowden called himself Verax[1]. Anyone who wants to send a message to Snowden* can just: $ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 79DEBE35 $ gpg --encrypt --sign --armor --recipient 79DEBE35 and post it publicly; perhaps on Pastebin. [1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/code-name-verax-snowden-in-exchanges-with-post-reporter-made-clear-he-knew-risks/2013/06/09/c9a25b54-d14c-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/code-n... *assuming you believe the key is authentic
- joeyh 13y ago79DEBE35 is a key in the possession of Wired, I'm sure they'll enjoy passing your message on the the NSA via their parent media giant. Edit: Also, it's not very hard to generate a different key with signature 79DEBE35, and put it on the key servers. gpg's displaying of such short abbreviations for keys is one the worst parts of its UI.
- drivebyacct2 13y ago>79DEBE35 is a key in the possession of Wired How do you know this?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- scott_karana 13y agoIt was the signing key on Wired's broadcast.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoSo? You can download my public key and encrypt something with it... and only I'll be able to read it with my private key. It's still "my" key even though you're signing or rather encrypting a message with it.
- dthunt 13y agoThe reason you would advertise a page like this is to get lots of people to visit it. It gives Snowden the ability to look like any of the other (tens?) of thousands of people who visit the URL in the next little while.
- gasull 13y agoThe Snowden could use Tor to access the website. Also, there's no other way to get the message to Snowden unless you give it publicity. If he browses the Internet for news, he will find there's a message from Wired for him.
- fleitz 13y agoIf you were hiding from the NSA.... I'd avoid browsing the internet for a while...
- alanh 13y agoThanks for the comment. I saw this story’s presence on HN as a complete waste of space until now.
- mikeash 13y ago