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by tptacek
3774 days ago
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Tangent, but: giant NSA data centers are such a red herring. The inevitable outcome is one of two things: 1. We've been missing something fundamental about computer science for many decades and all the encryption we use everywhere is going to be broken. 2. Everything is going to be unbreakably encrypted by default and no data center any country can build will ever so much as recover a single emoji from a single IM. Again: don't think about the status quo; think about 15-20 years from now. |
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3. "Enabling" (some kind of sabotage, infiltration, or collaboration) means a lot of things with a theoretically sound design are broken or backdoored in a way that is somehow hard to notice.
4. End-to-end encryption has a lot of UI inconveniences around key management, so it will only used for a small minority of communications.
5. The "Going Bright" paper's world in which it continues to be easy for governments to hack people. (However, the connection to the data centers isn't very obvious -- maybe for archiving stuff that was transferred with a non-forward-secret protocol, but why will things be transferred with such protocols?)
6. The fear about quantum computers is justified because they only cost about a billion dollars to reduce to practice at a level that can attack deployed systems. For some reason, the transition to post-quantum crypto is especially slow, difficult, or error-prone.
7. Crypto developers continue not to do Cryptopals and, for decades, continue to make frequent implementation mistakes that allow passive adversaries to defeat their systems.
8. There's going to continue to be an easy covert way to get in proximity of servers and read their session keys, but that way doesn't allow covert exfiltration of plaintexts from the servers so attackers need to record the ciphertext elsewhere.
9. The data centers are for recording metadata events, which are expected to become incredibly voluminous.
10. The Internet of Things industry still accepts second-class cryptographic mechanisms supposedly because of technical limitations of their devices, so uses smaller keylengths, no PFS, inadequate RNG, obsolete or custom ciphers...
11. People still use GSM phones with Kᵢ physically generated by their carrier as a basis for confidentiality of a portion of their communications, and it's still possible to attack the carriers' generation and distribution of these keys.