[cryptography] regarding the NSA crypto "breakthrough"

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Thu Sep 5 16:14:40 PDT 2013


On 9/5/13, coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 11:38 AM, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ...
>>> however, the crypto breakthrough discussed is more mundane:
>>
>> Source? Sure, non-PFS can be exploited.
>
> i asked Snowden for an authoritative copy... ;P

Didn't John just say something about journalists and
interpretation ;)

>> But extending that
>> as underlying explanation of the Bamford quote is dangerous.
>> It's Bamford's quote, ask him.
>
> there's lots of disinformation around this topic, comparisons and
> analogies that indicate this has been filtered through less technical
> intermediaries.
>
> he can't say much about specifics, remember?
>
>
>>>  deployment of deep packet inspection with SSL/TLS capabilities.[0]
>>
>> I'd call it 'applied decrypting' not some breakthrough in
>> 'cryptanalyze'ing
>> or 'break'ing any crypto. Words are important.
>
> see above regarding technical vs. non-technical.  for the high ups,
> getting access to encrypted communication is "breaking encryption".
> whether that is breaking by cooperative agreement and new hardware, or
> breaking by new attacks on crypto primitives themselves, it is
> indistinguishable to them but makes all the difference to us.
>
>
>
> to walk through with rough ballpark but by no means representative numbers

All good extended analysis indeed. Perhaps my issue is just
with the words. I read Bamford as indicating attacks against
the crypto itself, not tricks applied downstream or around it
(regardless of how wholesale, specific, successful or profitable a
given applied approach might be in the eyes of the doers or the done).

While recently novel and profitable with centralized services,
borrowing traditional certs [1] or logging the PFS session keys [2]
is vastly different from having a working "cryptanalysis" against the
long term thought to be dependable underlings such as
RSA, AES, ECC, etc.

Surely if the cooperation to achieve [1] is so tight then [2] would
be equally doable. Then again, might as well ship the plaintext
straight off the servers.



More information about the cypherpunks mailing list