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What The CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works (ap.org)
"If the tech industry is drawing one lesson from the latest WikiLeaks disclosures, it's that data-scrambling encryption works," writes the Associated Press, "and the industry should use more of it." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
Documents purportedly outlining a massive CIA surveillance program suggest that CIA agents must go to great lengths to circumvent encryption they can't break. In many cases, physical presence is required to carry off these targeted attacks. "We are in a world where if the U.S. government wants to get your data, they can't hope to break the encryption," said Nicholas Weaver, who teaches networking and security at the University of California, Berkeley. "They have to resort to targeted attacks, and that is costly, risky and the kind of thing you do only on targets you care about. Seeing the CIA have to do stuff like this should reassure civil libertarians that the situation is better now than it was four years ago"... Cindy Cohn, executive director for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group focused on online privacy, likened the CIA's approach to "fishing with a line and pole rather than fishing with a driftnet."
The article points out that there are still some exploits that bypass encryption, according to the recently-released CIA documents. "Although Apple, Google and Microsoft say they have fixed many of the vulnerabilities alluded to in the CIA documents, it's not known how many holes remain open."
The article points out that there are still some exploits that bypass encryption, according to the recently-released CIA documents. "Although Apple, Google and Microsoft say they have fixed many of the vulnerabilities alluded to in the CIA documents, it's not known how many holes remain open."
We knew that strong encryption works, because "math and stuff" that lawyers never learned. The point is that the mega companies are WILLINGLY giving your data away to anyone that pays. They provide an unencrypted endpoint to your data, so encryption of data in transit doesn't matter. We are much worse off than we were four years ago, and the cloud is doing to make it worse(er).
The point is, getting around encryption is too costly to do it on a mass scale, so they can only really do it for the small portion of targets judged worth it.
As an example, when you use https some secret code is negotiated between you and the server. There are some random numbers that should be used in the process, and apparently lots of servers use the same random numbers and don't change them. As a result, about 10% of all https at some point used the same random numbers.
In this particular case, there is an unconfirmed rumour that the NSA with an investment > $100 million managed to "crack" this one random number so that any https using one of those servers becomes crackable. That's $100 million, and that investment can be wiped out in a second by using a different random number. That gives you an idea of the cost of breaking encryption.
There is literally no evidence to support any of what you claim. Please cite 1) Where it's plain as day the NSA owned it 2) Any evidence of a backdoor, especially given that we have the source code and people have compiled that source to match the published binaries 3) Who wrote it including when they won an obfuscated C contest
Stop spreading your infowars-esque conspiracy theory bullshit, people are libel to think you know what you are talking about.
The other thing evident by ommission is that (say) the CIA gets a warrant to hack into your TV. They'll start collecting data, but will they 'unhack' your TV when they're done? Not much to suggest they do, so your TV stays hacked, even though you're not a suspect in some new case they're working on.
I'm still not convinced on EC cryptography, which was brought along with the help of the NSA choosing certain curves
There's nothing wrong with ECC. It has significant advantages over RSA, especially on low-power devices. There is a remote possibility that the NIST curves are weak in some way known to the NSA and not to the rest of the world, but if you're concerned about that you can simply choose different curves. Edd25519 is a particularly good choice (though Edwards curves work a little differently, so it's not a drop-in replacement for the NIST curves).
One should also note that when DES was being rolled out the NSA had specifically requested some tweaks be made to the algorithm that people were very skeptical of. Everyone thought the NSA was trying to do something sneaky then, too. It turned out that a known attack vector was discovered in the early 1970s and was not known to the public until the early 1990s. Whether or not the NSA is helping or hurting is something for the history books. There is no way for us to know at this point in time.
I'm still not convinced on EC cryptography, which was brought along with the help of the NSA choosing certain curves
There's nothing wrong with ECC. It has significant advantages over RSA, especially on low-power devices. There is a remote possibility that the NIST curves are weak in some way known to the NSA and not to the rest of the world, but if you're concerned about that you can simply choose different curves. Edd25519 is a particularly good choice (though Edwards curves work a little differently, so it's not a drop-in replacement for the NIST curves).
One should also note that when DES was being rolled out the NSA had specifically requested some tweaks be made to the algorithm that people were very skeptical of. Everyone thought the NSA was trying to do something sneaky then, too. It turned out that a known attack vector was discovered in the early 1970s and was not known to the public until the early 1990s. Whether or not the NSA is helping or hurting is something for the history books. There is no way for us to know at this point in time.
The NSA changed the DES S boxes to make them resistant to differential cryptanalysis, but it also shortened the key length. Had DES been standardized with IBM's original 128-bit key length (but with fixed S boxes), it would still be quite secure. So the NSA's role in DES was a mixed bag. They fixed a non-obvious flaw while introducing an obvious weakness (short keys) that would enable practical attacks in the future. The short key weakness wasn't what anyone could call a "back door", though, since it was obvious to everyone.
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