4 ms·
We can and we must. I'm glad that Bruce Schneier has now had a chance to view some of the primary source documents from the Snowden leaks, because I trust him
by ef4 13y ago
We can and we must.
I'm glad that Bruce Schneier has now had a chance to view some of the primary source documents from the Snowden leaks, because I trust him to speak frankly and I trust his technical ability.
(I'm referring to http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_brea.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_bre..., not the above link).
Both he and Snowden have essentially said that we can still trust the math. Modern symmetric crypto has enough safety margin that even extremely surprising breakthroughs wouldn't give the NSA practical decryption capabilities. (Asymmetric crypto is less certain, but even there Schneier still says discrete-log-based methods with sufficiently large keys are likely ok, and I would bet he's right.)
So the bottom line is this:
- using crypto correctly really matters, because they really are out to get you. Most software gets it wrong, not because there are no good cryptosystems, but because people are ignorant of how to do it right.
- build attack-resistant organizations, not just protocols. The more transparent, flat, and distributed an organization, the harder it is to secretly coerce into cooperating with the NSA. It's a lot harder to force a backdoor into Firefox than into Chrome.
- it turns out open source really matters. The tinfoil hat brigade is vindicated. Closed source vendors really are actively working against their customer's security.
- hyperbovine 13y agoIf the NSA had really broken asymmetric crypto it would imply that they were sitting on an huge unpublished result in one or more of a) complexity theory b) quantum computing c) number theory d) ?? something even more outlandish. It's difficult to imagine even them keeping a lid on that. Mathematics is not a large field nor is it by nature a secretive one. (Arguably recognition is the thing driving most mathematicians.) The furtive whispers would accumulate.
- eru 13y agoOh, in RSA there are also lots of `weak' numbers that you shouldn't choose. They might have found some attacks against some newly recognized weak numbers.
- wimbo 13y agoI don't really think this is an outlandish claim, especially as it already happened with public key cryptography: http://www.zdnet.com/gchq-pioneers-on-birth-of-public-key-crypto-3040090638/ http://www.zdnet.com/gchq-pioneers-on-birth-of-public-key-cr...
- NegativeK 13y agoRSA has plenty of mathematical gotchas that, if you don't know about them, will lead to a weaker implementation. If the NSA hasn't demolished public key crypto, it still seems reasonable to assume that they've made sure a significant implementation vulnerability (that looks like normal crypto give and take) has been inserted.
- ballard 13y agoJust started this... https://gist.github.com/6458569 https://gist.github.com/6458569 Feel free to fork and feedback.... Adversarial FTW.
- DanielRibeiro 13y agoRegarding the Quantum Computer hypothesis he brings up: there are crypto algorithms designed to survive attacks from them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography They are a lot more expensive, but if you want to be extra safe, it is good to know that there are alternatives.
- mitmatt 13y agoTo clarify, there are public-key cryptosystems with no known quantum attacks, but it's not known how to build such systems based on problems that are known to be QMA-complete (or NP-complete). Here's a discussion from Scott Aaronson (which has a corresponding chapter in his new book): http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec8.html http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec8.html > Currently, our best candidates for such trapdoor OWF's are based on lattice problems, like the Shortest Vector Problem (SVP) that I described earlier. Whereas factoring reduces to the abelian hidden subgroup problem, which is solvable in quantum polynomial time, SVP is only known to reduce to the dihedral hidden subgroup problem, which is not known to be solvable in quantum polynomial time despite a decade of effort. > Inspired by this observation, and building on earlier work by Ajtai and Dwork, Oded Regev has recently proposed public-key cryptosystems that are provably secure against quantum eavesdroppers, assuming SVP is hard for quantum computers.