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No it's a claim. A claim that needs to be formally disproven based on recent events. The assumption was originally that systems were secure until disproven. No

No it's a claim. A claim that needs to be formally disproven based on recent events. The assumption was originally that systems were secure until disproven. Now they are insecure until proven otherwise. The latter statement in the previous sentence is possibly impossible, ergo we're fucked.

MichaelGG 13y ago
It's a bit of hyperbole, and nothing direct from Snowden as far as I can tell. The actual releases (like XKEYSCORE) clearly show it intercepting unencrypted traffic. This could be something as simple as RSA1024 being "easily" crackable by the NSA, and hence "most encryption" would be vulnerable since so many people use RSA1024 for TLS. Taking random quotes and highlights from presentations isn't a very good way to get picture of an opponent's capabilities. Otherwise we'd think that Oracle has developed 100% secure database software that is impossible to break. I really hope Snowden releases some hard evidence or specific citations of what the NSA has broken, instead of the hand-wavy "like, everything, man" articles that have been rehashed several times in the past day. Speculation's sorta pointless.
- nly 13y ago
  > I really hope Snowden releases some hard evidence or specific citations of what the NSA has broken That's fairly unlikely. The Guardian articles say he never had access to such information, nor was it amongst the documents he liberated.
CoryG89 13y ago
I'm not sure it was ever the case that the original assumption was that systems are secure until disproven. The claim is more than likely alluding to a combination of techniques for breaking weak crypto (ie. sufficiently small keysize for brute force attack), or attacking the endpoints (backdoors, etc). This still doesn't seem like news to me, but hey, what do I know?
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  From an academic point of view, you are correct but my point was from a commerce and public perspective.

MichaelGG 13y ago

It's a bit of hyperbole, and nothing direct from Snowden as far as I can tell. The actual releases (like XKEYSCORE) clearly show it intercepting unencrypted traffic. This could be something as simple as RSA1024 being "easily" crackable by the NSA, and hence "most encryption" would be vulnerable since so many people use RSA1024 for TLS. Taking random quotes and highlights from presentations isn't a very good way to get picture of an opponent's capabilities. Otherwise we'd think that Oracle has developed 100% secure database software that is impossible to break. I really hope Snowden releases some hard evidence or specific citations of what the NSA has broken, instead of the hand-wavy "like, everything, man" articles that have been rehashed several times in the past day. Speculation's sorta pointless.

nly 13y ago
> I really hope Snowden releases some hard evidence or specific citations of what the NSA has broken That's fairly unlikely. The Guardian articles say he never had access to such information, nor was it amongst the documents he liberated.

CoryG89 13y ago

I'm not sure it was ever the case that the original assumption was that systems are secure until disproven. The claim is more than likely alluding to a combination of techniques for breaking weak crypto (ie. sufficiently small keysize for brute force attack), or attacking the endpoints (backdoors, etc). This still doesn't seem like news to me, but hey, what do I know?

harrytuttle 13y ago
From an academic point of view, you are correct but my point was from a commerce and public perspective.