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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 We do not publish what we research,' he said.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."
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.
Yes, really and truly, never in all time.
A 256 bit key has 2^256 possibilities. That's 1.15x10^77 possibilities. If you can try 10 million keys in a second, then you "only" need 1.15x10^70th seconds. If you can multiply that speed by a factor of a thousand, then you "only" need 1.15x10^67th seconds. That's 3.67x10^59th years. The universe is only 1.3x10^10 years old.
So never is more than fair. You would literally have to generate universes to generate universes to decrypt via brute force. By our current understanding of reality, impossible is correct, and anything shy of that is literally science ficition.
Except he's (more or less) right. James Ellis, at GCHQ (roughly the UK equivalent of NSA) had developed the basics of public key cryptography by the end of 1969. This was about 6 years ahead of Diffie Hellman and Merkle. In 1973, a GCHQ cryptographer, Clifford Cocks, realized that one-way functions would be an elegant way of achieving Ellis' insight. See http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm for example. This was some years ahead of RSA.
GCHQ and the NSA definitely would have exchanged this information. It's also quite possible that the US made some of these breakthroughs even earlier than the British; I've not paid much attention to anything NSA-related that has declassified in the last 5+ years.
Are you aware that randomly generating a specific protein is much more difficult than that? I've heard a number around 1 in 10^113. That would be just ONE of the proteins we need for life.
So. Either it needs to be rethought what is actually numerically possible, or that the genetic make-up of life was guided by chance.
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