Fwd: [Cryptography] An Open Source Analysis of NSA Cryptologic Capabilities

[grarpamp]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ryan Carboni <ryacko at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 5:27 PM
Subject: [Cryptography] An Open Source Analysis of NSA Cryptologic Capabilities
To: cryptography at metzdowd.com


Timeline of Events of Note

1992 - DES is broken cryptanalytically, although with an attack
greater than the birthday bound
1993 - SHA released, based on MD4/MD5
1995 - SHA-1 revised, original SHA now called SHA-0
1998 - Skipjack Released
1999 - Impossible Differential Analysis breaks 31 of 32 rounds
2001 - SHA-2 released, by Threefish's standards, a 256-round hash function
2005 - SHA-1 is broken by a non-practical attack, spurs SHA-3 competition
2010 - Xie and Feng announce a one block collision on MD5, which they
cannot release for _security reasons._

The occasional cryptanalytic success implies that the NSA is generally
more advanced, but not always. Cryptanalytic success seems to be a
random process, but it requires previous successes to exist. The NSA
seems to be more advanced than the Chinese, and the Chinese vaguely
more advanced than the remaining cryptographic community. This can
probably be attributed to the fact that the NSA has more money, has
the support of other SIGINT agencies in cryptanalysis, and thus
probably have half the world's mathematicians. Thus perhaps the NSA
has a 42% chance of getting a genuinely new cryptanalytic success, the
Chinese a 33%, and the rest of the world a 25% chance.

The evidence to support such a claim is that impossible differential
analysis nearly broke Skipjack, although maybe the NSA was aware of it
and had less concerns about security margins than we think. Further
attacks on SHA-1 and SHA-2 spurred the SHA-3 competition. While it was
reasonable for the civilian cryptographic community to be concerned,
the fact that the NSA was concerned is telling. It was a result they
did not predict, and they possibly thought further cryptanalysis could
break those two hash functions.

Fortunately there is a large body of research on the cost efficiency
of research programs. While one may conclude that the NSA must
perpetually be making leaps and bounds ahead of everyone through the
virtues of compound interest, the answer is pleasanter. There is a
diseconomy of scale when it comes to research. For instance, the Moon
program or the Manhattan project could have been cheaper if more time
was allotted for its completion.  Given that the nature of research
changes over time as the easiest results are exhausted, and that large
organizations do have waste, it is safe to say that any gap between
NSA and civilian cryptography will shrink by a small extent, year over
year.

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