[bigiain]

Surely I'm not the only one who read this and thought "I wonder how long the NSA have known this result, and how much better their internal attacks are than public academic results? I wonder how much of their 'full take' internet backbone archive has been decrypted and keyword mined?"

[secfirstmd]

There was a quote in a newspaper I unfortunately forget the location of about four years ago about a massive break through in encryption by the NSA post Snowden. Enough subtle hints about it. My working assumption had been it was RSA related. I noticed for example some interesting organisations changed their guidelines about its usage in past three years or so.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

If it is what I think it is, then it's commonly believed that they broke commonly used Diffie-Hellman parameters, allowing them to break any connection encrypted using those.

The parameters can, in theory, be safely used by everyone, and generating them is relatively expensive. But because a few of these parameters were extremely widely used, and they were only 1024 bits strong, it is believed that a gargantuan effort to break them was worth it and the NSA did it.

[drzoltar]

Which organizations changed their guidelines?

[gowld]

This has been speculated since logjam was discovered.