And what they can’t break, they record until they can.
keep your friends close and your enemies closer...
Our government practically owns and operates Google and Facebook, too.
“Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.”
The usual method used is either to steal the encryption passphrase, or use a passphrase-guessing program. These programs are quite useful if you know a lot about the target.
The NSA are wussies living in their mothers’ basements reading everyone’s emails to get their jollies.
Haven’t stopped a single terrorist attack, by all indications.
The Tsarnaevs are laughing at them.
I think it's like cracking WEP, but not WPA2.
-PJ
ping
Great. Just great!
FWIW my credit union just called and said Visa had notified them my debit card was on a list that had been hacked. But nothing appears to be missing. And they are sending me a new card.
We need to shut this shit down or we are slaves, and our futures is the ovens.
Any encryption scheme merely delays and increases the effort needed to read a message. That should be well understood by anyone who uses any encryption scheme. In some ways encryption makes your communications more vulnerable as attention tends to be focused on encrypted messages, rather than the vast number of clear text messages.
Of course the best way to keep your message safe is to use a one time use code, not a repeated cipher.
The other thing that protects your messages is the provision of vast amounts of false information with similar cipher techniques to those used with your true information. To work best, this is done with a plan as to the false ideas you want your enemy to think is true, and the true ideas you want your enemy not to know.
During WWII Germany tried to present an image of great strength, so enemies would be discouraged. They sought to plant the notion that they were manufacturing 1400 tanks a month.
Analysis of a few captured tanks in north Africa put the lie to that. The serial numbers were collected and seemed to all be very close together. Analysis of castings showed that the parts came from a small number of masters, and that put an upper limit on the rate of manufacture.
For people who seek to look behind the lies disseminated by propagandists, there is a good Wikipedia article on “The German Tank Problem”.
To all Freepers; Get some kind of encryption software for your email. Send 50 emails a day with a single message: “Drink more Ovaltine.”
It’s always been a race, someone comes up with a way of protecting something and then someone that wants that comes up with a way to crack that protection. The NSA has been doing what governments always do which is to constantly seek power and advantage. SSL and VPN’s are mostly based on public key cryptography that is old and in dire need of replacement and has been known to be vulnerable for some time. Even the newer public key algorithms are not anywhere near as good as AES so don’t expect any of them to provide protection against any government because they won’t.
The distressing thing is not that we are vulnerable but that the USG has bought and paid for so many technology companies and service providers that the encryption methods have become moot because they are using back doors to suck up everything before the data hits any encryption device. We’ve been sold out by Facebook, Goggle, Yahoo, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, etc.
Snowden did tremendous damage to our countries ability to suck up foreign intelligence and more than likely a lot of damage to the US economy long term as I see most countries moving away from US based suppliers and more towards either open source or suppliers from second and third world (read not China, Russia, UK, etc.). If I was a non-US based company or country I’d certainly be shopping elsewhere now and would imagine that a lot of them are scrambling to do just that.
How does a decrypter know it has been successful? How does it know the difference between gibberish and clear text? It’s a computer program and doesn’t understand anything. Does it look for words like “the” and “bomb”?
Don’t real terrorists use words like “the” and “Package”? Wouldn’t it write in code, like “Aunt Susie is going to deliver the package to New York”
And anyway, why would a true terrorist write in English?
In other words, if the decrypter doesn’t know what it’s looking for, what does it look for?
I would like to know. Not being flippant, for a change.
This leak makes me wonder a bit about the security of AES.
Personally I like Blowfish and RC4 .. many think RC4 is weak but I think it’s fine if properly implemented. It’s very easy to code RC4 for use in embedded systems. I love RC4 for its elegance and simplicity. http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/
ECC is what we need to use for public key, it’s what the NSA uses.
I imagine the NSA uses a lot of custom ASIC chips for code breaking...probably made in their own Fab. I bet NSA would be great at Bitcoin mining.
The ability of NSA to decrypt a particular implementation or type of encryption is tested by foreign adversaries by encoding false info with the system and watching to see if the U.S. takes any action based on that info.
Don’t trust anything but open-source encryption products.
For the most critical data I’d recommend the two parties create a truly random set of data using a noise source like brownian noise. Both parties must hold this data and keep it secure. This allows the parties to add a one-time-pad step to their usual encryption routine. The one-time-pad is unbreakable by any method, even when powerful quantum computers come on line they will have no hope of penetrating a one-time-pad system. The big problem with one-time-pad is you are taken back to the bad old days of the key exchange problem...secret data that must be shared by all users, it’s a drag!
Steganography must still be a huge problem for the NSA since there are nearly limitless ways to implement it. Just a few bits inside a huge data set can hold important info...how do you discern this??
V’z abg jbeevrq, V hfr gur fhcre frpher naq gurbergvpnyyl haoernxnoyr EBG13 nytbevguz.
this is going to kill the cloud computing bandwaggon.
Microsoft is one of the companies that has installed a back door into their vaunted ‘Bitlocker’ encryption protocol: