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The NSA claims to have a significant breakthrough in cryptanalysis from the Snowden revelations. I personally believe that through the commercial relations the
by aburan28 12y ago
The NSA claims to have a significant breakthrough in cryptanalysis from the Snowden revelations. I personally believe that through the commercial relations the NSA has partnered up with AMD/Intel to weaken chips and CPU's and could be even pushing microcode updates that could defeat encryption at such a low level that it would be nearly undetectable.
- quonn 12y agoHow? The CPU only has instructions for AES-NI (not for the actual encryption scheme, nor for key generation) and it has to be deterministic or it won't decrypt on the other side. The only thing I can think about is trying to leak information using timing attacks and I wonder if these can be introduced through microcode updates. I doubt it and besides the risk for Intel would be far greater than for any of the companies involved in PRISM.
- xnull2guest 12y agoWas the parent talking about RDRAND? In this case the randomness used by the machine for both cryptographic protocols and key generation could be compromised, making AES, implemented in AES-NI or otherwise, moot.