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NSA Turns To Commercial Software For Encryption
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to eWEEK, the National Security Agency (NSA) has picked a commercial solution for its encryption technology needs, instead on relying on its own proprietary code. "The National Security Agency has purchased a license for Certicom Corp.'s elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) system, and plans to make the technology a standard means of securing classified communications. In the case of the NSA deal, the agency wanted to use a 512-bit key for the ECC system. This is the equivalent of an RSA key of 15,360 bits." This summary includes the NIST guidelines for public key sizes and contains more details and links about the ECC technology. Since the announcement, Canadian Press reports that Certicom's shares more than doubled in Toronto."
Its pretty obvious. The strange pronunciation required for Canadian variables makes the code more difficult to comprehend and so creates an additional level of obfuscation and thus greater security.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
> The NSA's job is to make secure codes for government use, and break other people's codes. So they licensed someone else's code, but why are they announcing it for intra-government use? The obvious question is, Can't they roll their own?
Probably just means that they've discovered how to crack it, so now they want everyone else to use it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So what comes out is a solution that was produced much cheaper than a similar inhouse effort, and this will save the tax payers money (which sounds good to this poor college student.) I have to say I'm surprised at the Agency going after a commercial product for classified purposes, but I'm sure they have good reasons.
espo
The NSA practically can't not follow the license -- it's world-wide and allows granting sub-licenses, and is only restricted to use above a certain security level. The NSA would have to use relatively insecure implementations of the technology to violate the license, and I think that's unlikely:
Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC), a leading provider of wireless security solutions, today announced that the National Security Agency (NSA) in Maryland has purchased extensive licensing rights to Certicom's MQV-based Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) intellectual property. ECC is becoming a crucial technology for protecting national security information.
This agreement will give the NSA a nonexclusive, worldwide license with the right to grant sublicenses of MQV-based ECC covered by many of Certicom's US patents and applications and corresponding foreign rights in a limited field of use. The field of use is restricted to implementations of ECC that are over GF(p), where p is a prime greater than 2256. Outside the field of use, Certicom will retain all rights to the technology for other industries that require the same levels of security, including state and local government agencies. Certicom will continue its policy of making its intellectual property available to implementers of ECC under normal commercial terms on a non discriminatory basis.
everything in moderation
Being the NSA doesn't guarantee you can develop the best technology in every security-related area. If another company or research institute happens to come up with a technology that's remarkably better than anything else like it and patent it first (such as the ECC mentioned in the article), the NSA should and does license it. That is, they buy the the rights to use the technology that someone else spent a lot of time and effort to develop (maybe even more than the NSA put forth in this field) .
It's not like the NSA is buying a binary encryption software package they can't decompile, or shipping the secrets up to Canada for encrypting. This isn't a security concern. The NSA bought the concept of ECC, and Certicom deserves to be paid fairly for it. The NSA can do anything they want with ECC now, including grant sub-licenses without approvasl from Certicom. The only restriction is to require a minimum level of ecryption field size (encryption strength), which isn't a problem for NSA:
This agreement will give the NSA a nonexclusive, worldwide license with the right to grant sublicenses of MQV-based ECC covered by many of Certicom's US patents and applications and corresponding foreign rights in a limited field of use. The field of use is restricted to implementations of ECC that are over GF(p), where p is a prime greater than 2256.
everything in moderation
No.
No, DSA != ECC.
DSA and ECC both do encryption by exponentation, relying on the assumtion that the reverse function - the logarithm - is infeasible with the used keylengths. They are both called "Discrete Logarithm Systems".
But the multiplication is done in completly different mathematical contexts: DSA multiplies in the rings Z/p (that are the natural numbers modulo p, p being a prime) where ECC multiplies in suitable "elliptic curve groups over finite fields" . That are finite sets of "numbers" paired with an complicated operation called "multiplication". These "numbers" behave quiet odd.
The main practical difference is the neccessary keylength. Depending on the chosen eliptic curve, ECC keys are 4-8 times smaller than DSA keys. They get much closer to the "no attack is faster than the brute force attack"-paradigm than other public key algorithms like DSA or RSA.
Unfortunatly, huge classes of suitable elliptic curves got patented.
Google for free ECC software. There are at least some libraries published by academic research groups.
I stated this in another post, but I've got a link now:
The NSA is not lisencing software, it is lisencing the right to use Certicom's ECC cryptosystem. Cryptosystems now are usually known even when proprietary to allow mathematicians and cryptographers the ability to test the security of it. (The RSA cryptosystem for instance is thoroughly explained on RSA's web-site, but you would still need a lisence to use the algorithm in a program)
I found a tutorial by Certicom on their ECC cryptosystem here.
PS. I could be wrong, but from the article it seems that "intellectual property" and "This is the first time that the NSA has endorsed any sort of public-key cryptography system." that they are not actually lisencing software but are in fact lisencing the cryptosystem. If I am wrong, I humbly apologize.
on one hand, you have a crackhead who could get all the drugs he wanted legally and privately, but for some unexplicable reason bought his dope illegaly on the street through someone who could (and did) dime him out.
:) (For examples, see the SR-71, spy satellite imagery, Predator UAVs, the TIA project, etc. and the number of times Tom Clancy has been accused of espionage for incorporating published projects into his work.)
on the other hand, you have NSA could use whatever patented technique they wanted and no one would ever know, but they decide to go out and publicly annouce a license
You're wondering why the NSA didn't just go ahead and use Certicom's patented ECC implementation and keep it a secret? Because they're a lot bigger than Rush freakin' Limbaugh, and it only takes one employee to speak up and say, "we knew someone else patented this but we used it anyway" before someone gets in a lot of trouble.
No one wants that kind of a black eye. If that scandal broke, the manager who gave the go-ahead to implement the Certicom solution without licensing it would probably find himself reassigned to a communications post in Afghanistan.
And one thing about the US government... no matter how hard they try to keep things under wraps, they're just not very good at it. There are just too many nosy journalists and authors poking around... everything comes out sooner or later