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NSA Targeted 'The Two Leading' Encryption Chips (theintercept.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the makes-more-sense-than-targeting-the-two-trailing-ones dept.

Advocatus Diaboli sends a report from Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept about the NSA's efforts to subvert encryption. Back in 2013, several major publications reported that the NSA was able to crack encryption surrounding commerce and banking systems. Their reports did not identify which specific technology was affected. The recent backdoor found in Juniper systems has caused the journalists involved to un-redact a particular passage from the Snowden documents indicating the NSA targeted the "two leading encryption chips" in their attempts to compromise encryption. Quoting: The reference to "the two leading encryption chips" provides some hints, but no definitive proof, as to which ones were successfully targeted. Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins, declined to speculate on which companies this might reference. But he said that "the damage has already been done. From what I've heard, many foreign purchasers have already begun to look at all U.S.-manufactured encryption technology with a much more skeptical eye as a result of what the NSA has done. That's too bad, because I suspect only a minority of products have been compromised this way."

4 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Remember Huawei? by Ragnarok89 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Remember the big scare a while back about backdoors in Huawei network switches and routers? Looks like we weren't that far behind.

    1. Re:Remember Huawei? by Sique · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I would rather guess that the NSA knew about their own backdoor, and thus they suspected China of doing the same. It's a rule of thumb for me: If one side in a conflict warns about shenanigans from the other side which are not provable yet, you can safely assume that a) the first side thought about it themself and b) has already implemented it.

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
  2. Re:Well of course ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Have you seen Intel's Management Engine (ME).

    Jesus Christ on a hopping frog. It's basically a system for allowing Intel/NSA/GCHQ free reign over your IT.

    It's a small computer that runs alongside your main machine. It's sips power and runs even when the machine is off. It talks directly to the network card and takes instructions/returns data. It has open access to the entire machine's memory. You aren't allowed to know what it does. The entire system is cryptoed and proprietary.

    Intel is flogging this nightmare as a management system... when you couldn't design a more effective government sponsored backdoor into every PC. It's Intel giving the spies their wettest of dreams.

  3. Re:How is this a story exactly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Who here is shocked that a government agency whose job it is to FUCKING BREAK CRYPTOGRAPHY would target products that people actually use for cryptography?

    Obviously, nobody is "shocked" or is even claiming that someone else is stupid enought to be shocked. The emotion is anger, not shock.

    Why? Because actually the NSA's job is to protect US security, whereby breaking crypto is only one possible strategy for accomplishing that goal. A rational actor running the NSA might decide that it would be directly contrary to their mission to undermine the encryption used by the US, and also contrary to their mission to undermine the sale of US products.

    For whatever reason, that's not what they decided, so now we have a less secure country than if the NSA had done nothing.

    Either someone made a dumb decision (d'oh!), or someone within the NSA decided to do the opposite of their job (in exchange for whatever from whomever). Either way, that's something to be legitimately angry about. We all realize that even the cleverest mathematicians can have stunning-stupid PHBs telling them to do stupid things, but we all tend to hope for better. (Nothing wrong with trying to set the bar high, is there?) And one of the neat things about America is that above the PHBs there's an elected president. And now we're seeing that even as late as 2010 the guy on top wasn't firing people left and right for incompetence and betrayal, so we have yet again, another president in a long uninterrupted series of presidents making the wrong call.

    It's like we really are too stupid to elect someone to end the stupidity. Worse, at this point it looks like pretty much no matter how things go, in Jan 2017 we are going to get an even worse president than the last two. That's no matter whether you think the country is going to vote R or D. (Hillary Trump will have us longing for a return of Barrack Bush.) So that means the NSA is going to be working against the interests of America's security through at least 2020 (and We The People will be funding them, with taxes and externalities). With friends like these, we don't need enemies. Leave it to us, IIS and Al Queda: just sit back and relax.

    And yes, telling people about evidence of what they had already suspected, is news. Unless you're going to tell me that when aliens are (or aren't) found, viable fusion power is (or isn't) invented, and next year's CPUs are a few percent faster, those things also won't be news. (But you're not really going to claim you're that stupid, are you?)