NSA Says They Have VPNs In a 'Vulcan Death Grip'

An anonymous reader sends this quote from Ars Technica: The National Security Agency's Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking the encrypted traffic of virtual private networks (VPNs) and has developed tools that could potentially uncloak the traffic in the majority of VPNs used to secure traffic passing over the Internet today, according to documents published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel. A slide deck from a presentation by a member of OTP's VPN Exploitation Team, dated September 13, 2010, details the process the NSA used at that time to attack VPNs—including tools with names drawn from Star Trek and other bits of popular culture.

Comments

Re:4 years ago?

[khasim]

It's not so much the VPN technology as it is the failure to correctly implement and secure it.

TFA leaves the real content until the end of the article:

The data is then replayed from the repositories through a set of attack scripts, which use sets of preshared keys (PSKs) harvested from sources such as exploited routers and stored in a key database ...

So if the NSA wants to "crack" your VPN session they first record it (we know how they do that) then they try to brute force that recording using what is, essentially, a dictionary attack.

TFA seems more entranced by the cutesy names than by the technology.