Cryptography Expert Sounds Alarm At Possible Math Hack

netbuzz writes "First we learn from Bruce Schneier that the NSA may have left itself a secret back door in an officially sanctioned cryptographic random-number generator. Now Adi Shamir is warning that a math error unknown to a chip makers but discovered by a tech-savvy terrorist could lead to serious consequences, too. Remember the Intel blunder of 1996? 'Mr. Shamir wrote that if an intelligence organization discovered a math error in a widely used chip, then security software on a PC with that chip could be "trivially broken with a single chosen message." Executing the attack would require only knowledge of the math flaw and the ability to send a "poisoned" encrypted message to a protected computer, he wrote. It would then be possible to compute the value of the secret key used by the targeted system.'"

Comments

Re:The NSA

[gweihir]

While it allows for (possibly) justified surveillance by our government, it also allows for it by others.

Also not everybody is a US citizen. This may help spying on my country, for example, by a close-to-rogue nation (US) in its disregards for international law and human rights. Some things the US administration does, would be cause for war, if they were not so powerful. Abducting citizens of other nations for example and then denying it has happened. And we are talking European citizens here.

While NIST is a US agency, these standardization efforts are international, not US domestic. Get over your US-Centrig POV. The majority in all things on this planet is non-US.

Re:First Post?

[FooAtWFU]

I'd like you to meet my close personal friend, Osama Bin Laden, a leading terrorist. He thinks we're all infidels, that this country is full of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury. He'd like it if we installed Sharia law. He'd be thrilled if this little country called Israel (an ally of the US) were utterly destroyed.

He'd also like the US out of the middle East, true. And he has some good reasons to hate the US for its meddling around there, but to say that they just want to be left alone is poppycock.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those people are an absolutely tiny minority and can be dealt with sensibly. Nutcases who want to establish a world-wide caliphate under sharia law? The only "sensible" way to deal with them is bombs, and lots of them. That tiny minority is precisely the source of the problem. They're the ones planting the IEDs, kidnapping their fellow countrymen for being "collaborators", etc.

The majority of people would just like us to stop meddling. What the majority of people want is for it all just to stop. Our meddling is only a part of that. If we left, the shit would still happen. If we'd never gone, the shit would still happen.

Stop pissing people off and the nut-jobs who do want us removed will have lost their primary recruitment method. Problem is, the list of things that piss them off is extremely long, and includes things far more mundane than "invading country X". Things like "supporting Israel", "supporting Musharraf", and even "having a popular culture that's available on satellite and making Muslims dissatisfied with their 7th century religion".

See, you anti-USians are no better than the Bushies: you think the US is the center of the universe just like they do, only you think it's the cause of everything rather than the solution. Yes! If only the US would pull out of the middle east the Shi'a and Sunni Muslims will stop their feuding, which began the day Muhammad died.

Re:The NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking idiot bud. Get your head out of your asshole before trying to think with it.