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NSA can retain encrypted communications of Americans possibly indefinitely
- assafs 13y agoA good deal of encrypted material these days depends on the security of the private key, though -- e.g., HTTPS loses a good deal of security if the server's private key is known. Given the reach of PRISM and related projects, and given that a lot of the internet was using 1024-bit RSA keys for HTTPS, it's a good question wondering how much of those private keys are still ... private.
- Torgo 13y agoI have always wondered about this. What kind of security do you really get if, for example, your SSL key is distributed to a couple thousand CloudFlare servers all over the world?
- ra 13y agoZilch. Cryptographic security depends on good key management practices.
- rurounijones 13y agoWhat you have just mentioned is talked about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933784
- jiggy2011 13y agoIsn't pretty much everything moving in the direction of always-on encryption, so this in effects means they can store everything..
- pvnick 13y agoA bit offtopic, but is there a style associated with the image at the top? Particularly the way that eyeball looks, I've seen that style of artwork a lot when reading surveillance-related stories.
- pronoiac 13y agoI had the terrifying thought that this could apply to HTTPS or SSH sessions. That's alarmist, though, right?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mindslight 13y agoGiven that the only scrutiny they're ever subject to is public opinion in an occasional news-cycle-long burst, one would have to be pretty gullible to assume these guidelines imply any operational restrictions whatsoever. If no better excuse could be found, I'm sure this one would be trotted out to justify indefinitely storing even plain-text email - "in case of stenography".
- swombat 13y agoThe word is "steganography". Stenography is to do with taking notes.
- mindslight 13y agooops, thanks. Linguistic errors even give them ammunition for that kind of argument.
- LoganCale 13y agoGiven their other twisted interpretations of laws and policies to suit their purposes, I wouldn't be surprised. But we have no idea, because they classify everything, including how they interpret the existing laws.
- e3pi 13y ago>But we have no idea, because they classify everything, including how they interpret the existing laws. We do have an idea, let's label it 'Clapperspeak'. "Common accepted best practices of espionage trade craft" gives state sanctioned CLASSIFIED license to lie, cheat, steal, bear false witness, interpret 12 ways to Sunday, anything and everything.
- e3pi 13y agoMobile App Game: test the forever stored future with ten thousand inviting Voynich manuscripts with buried url tripwire alert beacons and countdown n-folded damascene crypto layerings that annunciate when finally cracked and the hunter bot-spider races along the breadcrumbs, trips the wire, and `hello'!
- nobody_nowhere 13y agoIf you read the doc, it says also that domestic communication "reasonably believed to contain evidence of a crime... may be disseminated to Federal Law Enforcement authorities".
- throwaway10001 13y agowould that evidence and fruits of it be admissible in court?
- jellicle 13y agoYes, of course.
- thomasjames 13y agoThat is good because, provided there is not some enormous leap forward in number theory in the meantime, they can keep working on trying to break 256-bit key RSA encryption "indefinitely" as well thanks to a higher law by the name of thermodynamics.
- mindslight 13y ago256-bit RSA, eh?
- croikle 13y agoTo expand on this a little, 256-bit RSA is easily crackable, since there are good algorithms for integer factorization. You need a significant increase in key length to get equivalent security to symmetric keys: Wikipedia claims 3072-bit RSA ~ 128-bit symmetric, 15360-bit RSA ~ 256-bit symmetric. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size#Asymmetric_algorithm_key_lengths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size#Asymmetric_algorithm_...
- grecy 13y agoWait 25 years until Moore's Law catches up, and they can break all those 256-bit encrypted things you did back in 2013.
- thomasjames 13y agoFrom Schneier in "Applied Cryptography" (1996): "Longer key lengths are better, but only up to a point. AES will have 128-bit, 192-bit, and 256-bit key lengths. This is far longer than needed for the foreseeable future. In fact, we cannot even imagine a world where 256-bit brute force searches are possible. It requires some fundamental breakthroughs in physics and our understanding of the universe. One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less than kT, where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the Boltzman constant. (Stick with me; the physics lesson is almost over.) Given that k = 1.38 × 10^−16 erg/K, and that the ambient temperature of the universe is 3.2 Kelvin, an ideal computer running at 3.2 K would consume 4.4 × 10−16 ergs every time it set or cleared a bit. To run a computer any colder than the cosmic background radiation would require extra energy to run a heat pump. Now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 1.21 × 10^41 ergs. This is enough to power about 2.7 × 10^56 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all its values. If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2^192. Of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter. But that's just one star, and a measly one at that. A typical supernova releases something like 1^051 ergs. (About a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but let them go for now.) If all of this energy could be channeled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states. These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."
- betterunix 13y agoI wonder if they might try to claim that this applies to ROT26. It would not be much more of a stretch than their other interpretations of the law...
- jiggy2011 13y agoGood point. Where does one draw the line between encryption,encoding and compression for example? What if a communication itself is not encrypted but contains encrypted elements, like maybe a session ID?
- betterunix 13y ago"Where does one draw the line between encryption,encoding and compression for example?" I am told that the FBI does not actually draw such a distinction when dealing with criminal messages. The term "null cipher" is used to refer to messages encoded in a non-randomized fashion that does not involve any secret key. I was being a bit sarcastic above, but honestly, I would not be surprised if the government tried to claim that base64 encoding counted as "encryption" in this situation.
- lurkinggrue 13y agoROT26 has some known vulnerabilities and there is a recommendation to move on to the much stronger ROT52.
- lantastic 13y agoI'm wondering: what is the cost of such retention? If all intercepted data was encrypted, would that not eventually bankrupt the system? While such a wide use of encryption seems unlikely, would it be possible to achieve the same effect by feeding the system with encrypted garbage? Even if it is eventually decrypted, it adds a lot of noise to the analysis effort, further increasing the cost.
- cherry314159 13y agoThis is great! Now to backup my old photos, I'll tar them and encrypt them and email them to myself. I can always try FOI request and get them back!
- Qantourisc 13y agoLets all generate lots and lots of cat /dev/random over ssh ?
- confluence 13y agoWell then let's make them store the entire internet. It's about time that we encrypted everything. Flood the communication channels with encrypted chatter and let's see how long they can keep storing it all. If you really want to fuck with them intersperse your encrypted data with random bits from /dev/random. Even better, just steam random bits non-stop and every so often intersperse it with just a tiny bit of your real data. The NSA knows how fucked they'd really be if everyone used end to end encryption. You can smell their fear.
- RKearney 13y agoYou probably want to use urandom instead of random. /dev/random will block if the entropy pool runs out whereas /dev/urandom will not.
- eru 13y agoOn Linux, yes. Not on the BSDs.
- fixxer 13y agoI agree in principle. There might be some blow-back with regard to metadata that they can now legally (under their definition) track. Let's do the math to see if that would even be possible: * 144 billion emails per day in the U.S. * Average email size is 75 kb. * Works out to about 10 petabytes/day. That facility they're building in Utah is exascale, so the computational burden isn't that much if they're simply looking at metadata. Obviously, decryption is more complicated. Last I checked, a MW/year runs about $1m with long term agreements (old number; probably $2m now). Assuming a budget on the order of billions, that isn't a huge hurdle for a government snoop to clear.
- steveklabnik 13y ago> Well then let's make them store the entire internet. The Utah facility is supposed to be able to store the next 100 years of all Internet data + traffic, even at the current projected rate of growth.
- brvs 13y ago
- tomjen3 13y agoAnd they can and do so for the rest of the world too, but who cares right? Only us citizens have a right to privacy at least according to hn.