Posted on 09/06/2013 10:32:48 AM PDT by Red Steel
Private encryption systems cracked or bypassed by agency
WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Security Agency, working with the British government, has secretly been unraveling encryption technology that billions of Internet users rely upon to keep their electronic messages and confidential data safe from prying eyes, according to published reports Thursday based on internal government documents.
The NSA has bypassed or altogether cracked much of the digital encryption used by businesses and everyday Web users, according to reports in the New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and the news website ProPublica. The reports describe how the NSA invested billions of dollars since 2000 to make nearly everyone's secrets available for government consumption.
In doing so, the NSA built powerful supercomputers to break encryption codes and partnered with unnamed technology companies to insert "back doors" into their software, the reports said. Such a practice would give the government access to users' digital information before it was encrypted and sent over the Internet.
"For the past decade, NSA has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies," according to a 2010 briefing document about the NSA's ...Security experts told the news organizations such a code-breaking practice would ultimately undermine Internet security and leave everyday Web users vulnerable to hackers
...One document said GCHQ had been trying for years to exploit traffic from companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook.
(Excerpt) Read more at theintelligencer.net ...
I bet they still can’t make sense of anything Lindsay Lohan says.
Unless the chips on the one time pad are compromised...
Actually, I’m old and simply don’t care any more.........Let ‘em come and get me, but I might be able to take out a couple of them first.
I grieve for my children and grandchildren, though.
Constitutional questions?
It's only disappointing if you expect impartiality. Bending the law to favor one group over the other is what government is all about. Ethanol as a motor fuel (Bush) Soylandra (0bama) Sugar import restrictions (Florida nd other Gulf state Republicans and Democrats) all of these are massive distortions of the marketplace designed to favor one group at the expense of the average taxpayer. If you got rid of all of the maketplace distortions caused by government I suspect retail prices fo everything would drop on average at least 15%.
The one unbreakable code is one-time pad.
If only it were that simple.
A perfect encryption system isn't going to be of much help, if a backdoor in your email program is secretly sending the plaintext.
GOP/RNC?! Hello? Is anyone there?! Hell, it’s not like they bothered w/ the Aug. town-hall meetings anywhere around here in Jax, FL either....
This is what they are supposed to do. The NSA was created out of the WWII codebreaking branches of the Army and Navy.
We need to invent a language and write everything backwards and then encrypt it
I always add PBUH (pi$$ be upon him)
Espironto!
well yes i am disappointed; i hope i never get so cynical that i dump the desire for true fairness (which as you suggest often means government just bowing out altogether) on the floor. government so often behaves like God went on vacation and needs them to staff the post!
We, the people must rise and cut government by 50 or 75 percent. Make it manageable once again. If we don’t we shall suffer the ills of our own self neglect.
The problem with one-time pads is distributing them. Both sender and receiver need to have copies. However, that's not an unsolvable problem.
Another issue with one-time pads is that the numbers in the pad must be genuinely random. If they are, in theory a one-time pad encryption is unbreakable.
Computers cannot generate genuinely random numbers. The best they can do is pseudorandom numbers. They look random, i.e., have the right distribution of digits, pairs, etc., and low correlation between different segments, but in fact they are created deterministically, and once the generating algorithm is known, the entire sequence can be replicated.
Genuinely random numbers can be generated by devices using phenomena such as radioactive decay. However, these are expensive and not readily available. (My son's doctoral dissertation was on generating random numbers by counting photons arriving on a two-dimensional array of detectors. Again, something not readily available.)
An alternative is to get numbers from a source such as a phone book. Go down the page, taking the last digit or pair of digits of each phone number in succession. Or use tables of economic or population data, such as the STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES. In that case don't use the last digit because it's been rounded. Take the next-to-last. I've tested these numbers, and they satisfy tests of randomness fairly well. Both sender and recipient must have copies of the same directory, and the recipient must know which page and column the numbers were taken from.
However, if "they" know what directory you used, they can crack the message by brute force, using a supercomputer to try all pages.
There are no really "easy" ways to generate one-time pads, but with some effort, they can be prepared and used with good assurance that the messages are secure.
It will not occur until God is seriously exalted again. Government has usurped powers of a god and that’s powered from infernal regions.
The bright side is that it’s likely any gospel effort that succeeds in this milieu is going to be a more stunning revival than the country has seen since its founding. God is up to the task. Are we willing to, as I may seem to oversimplify, give that Lion of Judah another big hug and a cheer? Maybe 95% of the battle here is cutting through the spiritual lies which claim that this won’t do any good. If everyone knew how well exalting the Lord reaps power, they’d be doing it all day for the joy of what happens. A rough battle... with stunning victories over and over.
In addition to the damage they've done directly by weakining Internet security, they'd done a huge amount of indirect economic damage -- nobody will be able to trust any American-sourced security products (unless they're fully open-sourced) for a long time, if ever. That is going to cost the tech sector billions of dollars.
We know that some of them have been cyberstalking their romantic interests; it would be very surprising indeed if they haven't been using the same techniques to get insider investment information of maybe even steal outright (well, other than the stealing from the taxpayers we already know about).
It's possible to avoid the single-point-of-failure problem by using a web-of-trust model (i.e. people sign each other's keys, and each user decides whose signatures to trust).
Thanks for that link. Schneier is usually good.
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