Slashdot Mirror
NSA Building US's Biggest Spy Center
New submitter AstroPhilosopher writes "The National Security Agency is building a complex to monitor and store 'all' communications in a million-square-foot facility. One of its secret roles? Code-breaking your private, personal information. Everybody's a target. Quoting Wired: 'Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. "We questioned it one time," says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. "Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys." According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, "You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking." It was a candid admission.'"
The one time pad could make a comeback in the form of a one time DVD's or maybe even SD or Micro SD chips. I know, it is not scalable due to the problem of distribution. It is also symmetric in that the same "key" encrypts and decrypts, but it is also immune to brute force since your one time key is equal to or longer than the message length. An interesting variation might be to use an image file that is very long, but completely innocent as a pseudo random key and only have two copies of that exact image. The former Soviet Union used a one time cypher for all of their clandestine agent communications.