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by chives
5121 days ago
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From a wired article:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al... "Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program." Its a recent article outlining what's ahead (and presently implemented) for the NSA. Given what is already known, the U.S. Govt already has access to your e-mail, and they have the capabilities to decrypt it should your e-mail become high priority. I'm sorry, but the sky is falling. |
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The idea that they can create collisions for hashes or crack ciphers believed to be relatively secure in the near to mid future is paranoid speculation.
However, if you're going to be paranoid, direct your attention to RSA and DH (plain, not ECDH). In Suite B, which the NSA recommends for use by government, RSA and DH are absent. If the NSA knows of a weakness in anything currently believed to be secure (I think that's unlikely), I would bet that it's RSA and DH, because the NSA no longer recommends them. I think RSA and DH are superseded by ECDSA/ECDH simply because of speed at comparable key strengths, not because the NSA knows something the public doesn't. As an aside, it indicates that the NSA has a fair amount of confidence in ECDSA/ECDH.
I do not think the NSA is stupid enough to play chicken with the public crypto community by recommending encrypting classified information with ciphers NSA knows to be weak. The public could discover those weaknesses tomorrow. The most sensitive information inside the U.S. government and military is presumably protected by the NSA's Suite A algorithms, but other important information is not, notably military communications between U.S. allies, for which Suite B is recommended.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/can_the_nsa_b...