Can the regime spy on your online backup?

[Anti Federalist]

It's in the cloud.

The Empire can get it.

Period.

There is only one way to be sure...physical posession and killing it with fire.

 

[My First Name Is Paul]

what if all encryption really originated at the NSA? Are there really any independent thinkers that have invented an encryption technique that doesnt have origins at the government/spy level? you can argue they 'learned' on their own, but does the system they invent have origins that are truly original?

think about it...

Usually when I research about government created technologies, the origins most commonly come from researchers' theories that the government wanted to put into practice.

As far as encryption goes, the source code for the most commonly used methods is completely open source and thousands if not tens of thousands of experts around the world from every angle have reviewed and are reviewing the code right now. An enormous percentage of the world's economy is based on the proper functioning of encryption, which is the primary reason I don't buy conspiracy theories around its having been cracked, manipulated, or rendered obsolete by a secret technology. Why would a researcher choose to share such a breakthrough with the NSA instead of keeping it for himself? Think about it, the researcher would have access to everything the NSA is doing, so couldn't be blackmailed. The researcher could steal as much money as he wanted from any bank, including central banks. The power would be too much to contain himself, were he such a malicious researcher.

Such breakthroughs are rarely the work of independent scientists, anyway. It's usually an evolution of breakthroughs from different scientists that lead to the creation of the first prototypes.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

It's in the cloud.

The Empire can get it.

Period.

There is only one way to be sure...physical posession and killing it with fire.

Even then, The Empire could hack your 'puter and get your data. They can print/borrow enough money to hire the best hackers in the industry (at your expense, of course).

 

[heavenlyboy34]

what if all encryption really originated at the NSA? Are there really any independent thinkers that have invented an encryption technique that doesnt have origins at the government/spy level? you can argue they 'learned' on their own, but does the system they invent have origins that are truly original?

think about it...

Like the rest of the government, the NSA is completely incompetent. To do that, they would have to hire someone who actually knows what to do. So, I doubt it.

Think about this-the government can't even run the fucking post office at a profit. They couldn't build a tank, gun, bullet, or even a knife themselves.

 

[CPUd]

what if all encryption really originated at the NSA? Are there really any independent thinkers that have invented an encryption technique that doesnt have origins at the government/spy level? you can argue they 'learned' on their own, but does the system they invent have origins that are truly original?

think about it...

The modern encryption algorithms most of us use are no big secret. That's not the point of it - they are published, and everyone in the field studies them. Here is an oversimplified example:

Say your encryption function performs an operation on a prime number x as such: E(x,z): -> x^z

It's just a simple power function. If you have x and z, you can probably do it on a piece of paper in a few seconds, and it would take z multiplications.

Now, suppose you have only x^z and z, and you want to find x. Then you know log_x(x^z) = z, and x^z = x^(log_x(x^z)). This gets a bit complicated to do on paper.

On a computer, what you can do is start at the lowest possible x, so we set n = x, raise to power z and check if n^z == x^z. If not, we set n to the next possible x. This will take z^k multiplications, for some integer k.

Remember we said x was a prime number. Essentially, what it boils down to (remember this is oversimplified version) is that you will have to find a very large number x^z that has 2 prime factors. We know this particular problem takes exponential time, and is in a class of problems with a complexity known as "non-deterministic polynomial time" (NP).

This means we can say for sure that no modern computer can solve a worst-case instance of this problem in a reasonable amount of time- meaning we would all be dust before it happens. A quantum computer would perform several orders of magnitude faster than a binary one, and can factor small primes in (regular) polynomial time, but it has yet to be proven in the general case, which would include large primes. It is currently in a class called "bounded error quantum polynomial time" (BQP).

There are several elements of what i attempt to explain above, which are on the list of unsolved problems in CS. If you solve one, there are several organizations out there who would award a large cash prize. For anyone interested, a list is on this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_computer_science

 

[heavenlyboy34]

The modern encryption algorithms most of us use are no big secret. That's not the point of it - they are published, and everyone in the field studies them. Here is an oversimplified example:

Say your encryption function performs an operation on a prime number x as such: E(x,z): -> x^z

It's just a simple power function. If you have x and z, you can probably do it on a piece of paper in a few seconds, and it would take z multiplications.

Now, suppose you have only x^z and z, and you want to find x. Then you know log_x(x^z) = z, and x^z = x^(log_x(x^z)). This gets a bit complicated to do on paper.

On a computer, what you can do is start at the lowest possible x, so we set n = x, raise to power z and check if n^z == x^z. If not, we set n to the next possible x. This will take z^k multiplications, for some integer k.

Remember we said x was a prime number. Essentially, what it boils down to (remember this is oversimplified version) is that you will have to find a very large number x^z that has 2 prime factors. We know this particular problem takes exponential time, and is in a class of problems with a complexity known as "non-deterministic polynomial time" (NP).

This means we can say for sure that no modern computer can solve a worst-case instance of this problem in a reasonable amount of time- meaning we would all be dust before it happens. A quantum computer would perform several orders of magnitude faster than a binary one, and can factor small primes in (regular) polynomial time, but it has yet to be proven in the general case, which would include large primes. It is currently in a class called "bounded error quantum polynomial time" (BQP).

There are several elements of what i attempt to explain above, which are on the list of unsolved problems in CS. If you solve one, there are several organizations out there who would award a large cash prize. For anyone interested, a list is on this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_computer_science

I bow before your mathematical wizardry.

 

[My First Name Is Paul]

Obligatory.