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NSA Still Ahead In Crypto, But Not By Much
Hugh Pickens writes "Network World summarizes an RSA Conference panel discussion in which former NSA technical director Brian Snow said that cryptographers for the NSA have been losing ground to their counterparts in universities and commercial security vendors for 20 years, but still maintain the upper hand in the sophistication of their crypto schemes and in their ability to decrypt. 'I do believe NSA is still ahead, but not by much — a handful of years,' says Snow. 'I think we've got the edge still.' Snow added that that in the 1980s there was a huge gap between what the NSA could do and what commercial encryption technology was capable of. 'Now we are very close together and moving very slowly forward in a mature field.' The NSA has one key advantage (besides their deep staff of Ph.D. mathematicians and other cryptographic experts who work on securing traffic and breaking codes): 'We cheat. We get to read what [academics] publish. We do not publish what we research,' he said. Snow's claim of NSA superiority seemed to rankle some members on the panel. Adi Shamir, the "S" in the RSA encryption algorithm, said that when the titles of papers in NSA technical journals were declassified up to 1983, none of them included public key encryption; 'That demonstrates that NSA was behind,' said Shamir. Snow replied that when technologies are developed separately in parallel, the developers don't necessarily use the same terms for them."
what else would you expect from a public servant. he won't admit the private sector has them beat because it'd be the end of his job.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I don't think so... public key cryptography was discovered by the GCHQ at least a decade before it was discovered in the public sphere: http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm
"Snow replied that when technologies are developed separately in parallel, the developers don't necessarily use the same terms for them."
Sure, and I invented cars 200 years ago, but I didn't call it a car so someone else got the credit.
The NSA may have a "deep staff of Ph.D. mathematicians and other cryptographic experts who work on securing traffic and breaking codes" but let's face it, government departments are not exactly known for being the most motivated of the various sectors, and that's further exacerbated if you know you aren't going to get credit for your work as opposed to being kept secret ... I mean, in academia, one of the major motivations for leading scientists is that they get widespread recognition for their work. I suspect the funding to maintain that "deep staff" of experts probably serves more to keep those experts from being more productive 'elsewhere'. And of course they have to maintain that they are 'ahead' if they want to keep getting funded year after year, so I'd take it with a pinch of salt.
Nah. The money is now in electromagnetic remote sensing; reading your screen and listening to your keyboard from a mile away. That, and psy-ops. Humans still control keys. Humans always make at least one mistake. Google's mail accounts were cracked because their subjects could be coaxed to visit malicious websites, after all.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Let me tell you from firsthand experience. You cannot even fathom the awesomeness that goes on inside the cube unless you work there. It is not like Hollywood portrays it, but there is a whole lot of cool going on in there. That is why people work for the NSA. Now, I have philosophical disagreements with how the NSA ran business during the Bush years and I left that industry for aerospace. That being said if any of my former colleagues tell me that things have changed I think that I would go back.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
I don't believe it. The government wants everyone to believe they are all powerful and know everything but obviously they don't. Either that or they let 9/11 happen on purpose. One or the other they suck. Look at that bunch of CIA douchebags that got suicide bombed by their own informant. How clueless can you be. It's so obvious the ISI are the ones in control in South Asia. All your high tech gizmos and satellites and some stone age goat farmers with Kalishnikovs are beating you. Haha.
But not, apparently, a lot of grown up usage of the English language.
Some people like knowing things that other people don't know and having secrets. Some people like adding to the store of human knowledge, and knowing that they have left the world a slightly better informed or capable place. Personally, I know from experience which type I prefer to work with, and it's not the "I'm a member of the in crowd, you're not" type.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If the NSA has any problem, then it's to store and process/search through the data they get...not the acquisition.
Well that, and interagency cooperation, which the Department of Homeland Security was designed to fix. Instead, it now pursues its own agenda and has proven counterproductive towards those ends. The value of intelligence is not in whether or not you can acquire the information, but whether you can do so in a timely and reliable fashion, and have the resources to analyze it to determine trends, form conclusions, and execute decisions in a timely manner. Intelligence operations don't have a defined start and end point. They are organic cycles which vary over time depending on current policy decisions. But it is a continual process, not a linear one as many here seem to think.
Breaking codes is just a small part of the NSA's overall role within the government. Not only that, but they're not the ones spying on you domestically (generally); That's the job of the FBI (generally) unless a foreign national is involved or they suspect you have international ties with a terrorist organization or individual, or are pursuing criminal enterprise that could endanger national security (for example, if you're a network administrator at Honeywell, which does defense work), or if you are related to any of the above. And frankly, the FBI has a pattern of only investigating high value targets or those that gather media attention because their internal organizational structure is so inefficient that most of their resources are eaten in administrative overhead, leaving very little for actual field work. Unlike marines that live for the day they get to go outside the wire, most at the FBI are content to work 9-to-5 shifts moving papers from one desk to the next. Believe it or not, a major portion of the FBI's intelligence gathering is still open source, even given the low barriers to nearly unlimited access to anything in the private sector.
That said, intelligence gathering proactively in sigint is a rarity -- it can provide leads, but generally it is reactive in nature. You have your boots in the ground finding names and getting a lay of the land. sigint resources are then allocated against the target to see if anything interesting can be found. In other words, the fact that the NSA has all your emails, phone records, etc., doesn't mean anything unless somebody files a report saying "Hey, check this guy out." There's plenty of files they have where they have good reason to suspect criminal activity but don't invest resources in it because it just isn't costing society enough yet to justify the judicial process.
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