Reuters: RSA Weakened Encryption For $10M From NSA

[GunnyFreedom]

Pretty safe to say that everything of technology importance has been compromised. Everyone has a price and the "bidder" has a printing press.

AND WE'RE STILL ONLY ABOUT 2% INTO SNOWDEN'S DOCUMENT CACHE!

If I can get it funded, I can build legit NSA-Proof computers.

 

[DamianTV]

If I can get it funded, I can build legit NSA-Proof computers.

If you build it, they will come. ... and arrest you.

 

[devil21]

If you build it, they will come. ... and arrest you.

That, or we'll find out what Gunny's price is

(j/k...mostly)

 

[GunnyFreedom]

If you build it, they will come. ... and arrest you.

LOL that's actually part of the plan. NSA and DHS come harassing I plan to make enough of a public hub-bub that they have no choice but to throw me in jail. At which point the NSA-Proof computer will instantly become so popular that my people can't make them fast enough. I'll be a political prisoner for 4-12 months, but when I get out I'll be a multi-millionarie!

That, or we'll find out what Gunny's price is

(j/k...mostly)

Ultimately, I perceive more money from actually making the thing right than from passing on it, or from putting a back door into it. Besides, most of the component parts of my system are open source, so any potential back door would kinda be spotted immediately anyway.

So even if I had a price when it comes to this kinda stuff, (Oh I have my price allright, but when it comes to this particular area the price is too high for the entire planet put together), I'd still make more money by leaving the security intact, and even if I WERE crooked enough to leave a secret back door, it would stay secret for all of a week, being open source and all of that.

I try and role-play this as a total sociopath, and I'm still coming out ahead by telling the NSA to get stuffed.

ETA -- really though, if I was going to sell out, it probably would have been last session of the NC General Assembly when selling out would have actually profited me instead of rendering me jobless and nearly homeless.

 

[osan]

What do you guys think about encryption gurus like Bruce Schneider? How about AES as an alternative encryption? DES and Triple DES is broken as shit, the one way encrytpions like MD5 are also cracked all to hell. What alternatives are you guys thinking?

Other than an OTP, there have thus far been contrived/discovered no provably uncrackable encryptions schemes. In theory, one-way functions could provide uncrackable code, but as the last time I checked one-way functions have yet to be proven. There are functions that are believed MAY be true one-way, but so far as I know nobody has yet figured out a proof. Therefore, even schemed like RSA are far from assured as uncrackable. According to conventional wisdom they are, however, NP-complete in their time complexity in terms of how long the average attack takes to succeed. But today's NP-complete scheme becomes tomorrow's piece of cake because if the code is not provably uncrackable in principle, then cracking becomes nothing more than a waiting game and all advances in technology chip away at the wait time.

I believe I wrote about this here before, but I'll repeat it anyhow. I have a friend who was one of the geniuses at Cray Research (though he says he's a real dumbass compared with guys like Seymour Cray, RIP), and years ago when I quipped that it would not surprise me if NSA was able to crack 512-bit RSA in minutes all he did was smile and say, "no comment." Take from that what you will.

The bottom line is this: if there is something you do not want others to know about, keep it to yourself. That said, one thing you can do - I used to do shit like this all the time just to be a wiseass - is to get yourself a REALLY good random number generator, and they are not easy to find and very difficult to design and implement, and generate strings of ASCII characters and mail them to people. If 20 million people did this once a day, NSA would possibly be swamped, unless their analytic methods were so strong that they could sniff this out rapidly, and I would suspect that such analysis would tend to fall to the extremes of success and failure in terms of time complexity: they either have some brilliant heuristics that tell them virtually instantly that a given string is bullshit or they churn on dead-ends for hours or months... but really, who knows? What I do know is I do not trust any encrption scheme other that OTP. The only other safe mode of exchange are SAWDs, but it is not the encryption per se that is uncrackable but rather the non-detectable nature of the message itself within the noise stream.

 

[jmdrake]

God bless you Edward Snowden.

So. This tells us something very important. The NSA isn't able to break strong encryption without help.

 

[jmdrake]

If I can get it funded, I can build legit NSA-Proof computers.

So when are you starting your kickstart campaign? By June I'll be able to contribute something. Of course then we'll be getting all kinds of "moneybomb this, moneybomb that" request. But this is freaking important.

 

[jmdrake]

Wow! I didn't think of that. If Snowden had released everything at once, like Bradley Manning, he'd be off the front page by now. Instead, right whenever the assholes in and around Washington start talking "string him up", he releases more info to show who the real traitors are. He's not just a computer genius. He's a tactical one as well.

 

[HOLLYWOOD]

Oldies but Goodies... eff.org has a long list of encryption history data capture on encryption technologies and I find one very funny.

Clinton Administration announces Clipper Chip, 1993

https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Key_escrow/Clipper/wh_crypto_original.announce

The NSA's "Clipper Chip" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION'S TELECOMMUNICATIONS INITIATIVE
Q: Does this approach expand the authority of government agencies to listen in on phone conversations?
A: No. "Clipper Chip" technology provides law enforcement with no new authorities to access the content of the private conversations of Americans.

Q: Suppose a law enforcement agency is conducting a wiretap on a drug smuggling ring and intercepts a conversation encrypted using the device. What would they have to do to decipher the message?
A: They would have to obtain legal authorization, normally a court order, to do the wiretap in the first place. They would then present documentation of this authorization to the two entities responsible for safeguarding the keys and obtain the keys for the device being used by the drug smugglers. The key is split into two parts, which are stored separately in order to ensure the security of the key escrow system.

Q: Who will run the key-escrow data banks?
A: The two key-escrow data banks will be run by two independent entities. At this point, the Department of Justice and the Administration have yet to determine which agencies will oversee the key-escrow data banks.

Q: How strong is the security in the device? How can I be sure how strong the security is?
A: This system is more secure than many other voice encryption systems readily available today. While the algorithm will remain classified to protect the security of the key escrow system, we are willing to invite an independent panel of cryptography experts to evaluate the algorithm to assure all potential users that there are no unrecognized

 

[awake]

Government steals its "citizens" money then uses it to bribe others to help keep an eye on its victims, err "citizens" . Evil is government, government is evil.

 

[twomp]

I personally know senior HR people, and that's exactly what the executives/boardroom officials have told HR departments to implement... Get rid of the high cost US workers and recruit and use, the foreign low wage and benefits foreign/immigrant workers, esp... H1B/H2C workers. Dilute the high tech, entertainment, energy industries, as fast as possible with cheap foreign labor.

Their analysis in their documents are for, eventual cost savings of 50% So there you have it, cut wages/benefits by half on what Americans are currently earning. That's simply incredible.

PS: It's good to have friends in high places... you can seen the game plan from scumbags like; Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc... before it hits the economy.

If you believe in the free market then you should know the best most qualified people will get hired somewhere else. Those companies that hire staff that are not up to par will eventually fall apart. Why rely on the government to pass laws to fix something the market can fix for itself.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

If you believe in the free market then you should know the best most qualified people will get hired somewhere else. Those companies that hire staff that are not up to par will eventually fall apart. Why rely on the government to pass laws to fix something the market can fix for itself.

Whatever happened to "fix the welfare state first"?

Is the "free market" strictly limited to Bill Gates and Zuckerberg importing cheaper and indentured workers?

Yes, companies that continually make bad decisions do fail, but it takes a long time, and now, they are all too big to fail anyway. Taxpayers will bail them out. That's not a free market. You think that having private meetings with the President to push your interests and agenda is a "free market"?

And when you do flood the market with a product (this product being labor), the price eventually equalizes at a lower price. The purchasing power of the people drops. Standard of living drops. Combined with a recession and a terrible economy that depends on the Fed printing money, the real unemployment rate will rise. When the unemployment rate rises, the welfare state increases.

Once again, what ever happened to "fix the welfare state first"?

 

[idiom]

God bless you Edward Snowden.

So. This tells us something very important. The NSA isn't able to break strong encryption without help.

Its more that it tells us that the NSA is run by rubberhose cryptographers, rather than real nerds.

 

[helmuth_hubener]

This is really explosive news.

I'm glad that ronpaulforums is keeping me up on these releases. Thank you, DamianTV, and whoever put it on the front page.

 

[CPUd]

Abstract.

We performed a sanity check of public keys collected on the web and found that the vast majority works as intended. Our main goal was to test the validity of the assumption that different random choices are made each time keys are generated. We found that this is not always the case, resulting in public keys that offer no security. Our conclusion is that generating secure public keys in the real world is challenging. We did not study usage of public keys.

Arjen K. Lenstra, James P. Hughes, Maxime Augier, Joppe W. Bos, Thorsten Kleinjung, and Christophe Wachter, "Ron was wrong, Whit is right," in CRYPTO 2012, August 2012.

http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/064.pdf

https://easterhegg.ch/slides/rwwr-pres.pdf

tl,dr; 2 of every 1000 RSA public keys are weak.

 

[HOLLYWOOD]

I'll tell you what... you would think Snowden was the worse of traitors if you are watching ANY of the state sponsored corporate media outlets today. FOX NEWS had 3 NEWSCORP employees from the Wall Street Journal on TV today, and all were pro BIG BROTHER statists, anti Snowden spewers, led by WSJ's Dan Hedinger...

Then another segment was on hosting Statist NEOCON regular pundit and former CIA Special Operative, Wayne Simmons. Who stated this morning, Eduard Snowden is a traitor, blah, blah... but what was unusual, this guy is using almost the exact same context on attacking every whistleblower that worked in the intelligence communities and here's how I researched it.

The Orwellian apologist, Wayne Simmons' quote on Mary McCarthy former CIA director(Africa) and WH security adviser on Intelligence, for 'Allegedly whistle-blowing the CIA's TOP SECRET/Black Ops, torture chambers built in foreign nations. Here's the coverage on Simmons,

Former CIA operative Wayne Simmons told Fox News' John Gibson that there was "no excuse" for McCarthy's alleged leak. "She is no different than the Ames or the Hanssens who have sold intel to others.... I'm absolutely shocked that this woman is not sitting in jail right now awaiting trial and continuing to be debriefed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McCarthy_(CIA)#cite_note-NYT22-12

Today Wayne Simmons stated almost the exact words on Eduard Snowden, as he did Mary McCarthy. So remember, FOX NEWS/NEWSCORP is no friend to the US Constitution, Liberty, Freedom, or the TRUTH and are more like the unofficial public relations firms for Washington DC.

Thank goodness people are taking the time to record these deceivers and propagandists on TV/Radio.
,

God bless you Edward Snowden.

So. This tells us something very important. The NSA isn't able to break strong encryption without help.

 

[youngbuck]

I personally know senior HR people, and that's exactly what the executives/boardroom officials have told HR departments to implement... Get rid of the high cost US workers and recruit and use, the foreign low wage and benefits foreign/immigrant workers, esp... H1B/H2C workers. Dilute the high tech, entertainment, energy industries, as fast as possible with cheap foreign labor.

Their analysis in their documents are for, eventual cost savings of 50% So there you have it, cut wages/benefits by half on what Americans are currently earning. That's simply incredible.

PS: It's good to have friends in high places... you can seen the game plan from scumbags like; Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc... before it hits the economy.

Do you know if this is also the case for the healthcare industry?

 

[DamianTV]

Related:

Worried OpenSSL uses NSA-tainted crypto? This BUG has got your back.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/20/openssl_crypto_bug_beneficial_sorta/

 

[HOLLYWOOD]

Do you know if this is also the case for the healthcare industry?

High tech sector now, Health sector next, just you watch... check this coincidence out from POLITICO... on Barry the Con Man, if you can read between his statements, he's doig exactly what Thomas Jefferson warned us about the "INCREMENTAL" loss of everything: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/...e-immigration-reform-bill-101401.html?hp=t2_3

By REID J. EPSTEIN | 12/20/13 4:54 PM EST

When President Barack Obama had hopes the House might pass an immigration reform package, he said he was supportive of a piecemeal series of bills.
That support may have been short-lived.

Obama on Friday urged the House to back the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill, describing it as a settled matter that the legislation would benefit the country and is politically popular — without mentioning the option of slicing the measure into a series of smaller provisions.

While the question of piecemeal bills wasn’t directly raised Friday, Obama praised the Senate bill — as Vice President Joe Biden did last week — and said the House should pass it.
“There are a few differences here and there, but the truth of the matter is that the Senate bill has the main components of comprehensive immigration reform that would boost our economy, give us an opportunity to attract more investment and high-skilled workers who are doing great things in places like Silicon Valley and around the country,” Obama said. “So let’s go ahead and get that done.”
Speaking of his goals for 2014, Obama said he hoped the House would pick up the baton from the Senate.
“We can get immigration reform done,” Obama said. “We’ve got a concept that has bipartisan support. Let’s see if we can break through the politics on this.”

(Also on POLITICO: Obama downplays poor poll numbers)
The apparent public shift away from agreeing to entertain the piecemeal series of immigration bills — none of which have yet been brought to votes in the House — and back to stressing comprehensive legislation began last week when Biden urged House Speaker John Boehner to call a vote on the Senate bill.
“He is unwilling to let the House speak, he is unwilling to let the House vote,” Biden said. “John Boehner, call up the bill.”
Obama spent much of the summer and fall calling for the House to take up the Senate legislation, then during an interview at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council said he was fine with the House passing a series of immigration bills.

(Also on POLITICO: Immigration’s next hurdle: Obamacare)

“If they want to chop that thing up into five pieces, as long as all five pieces get done, I don’t care what it looks like,” Obama told the Journal’s event. “What we don’t want to do is simply carve out one piece of it … but leave behind some of the tougher stuff that still needs to get done.”
Obama’s return to putting pressure on House Republicans to pass a comprehensive immigration bill comes as the White House is facing more pressure from immigration reform activists to order his administration to use more discretion in reducing the number of deportations.

(Also on POLITICO: Chris Christie joins immigration fray)
On Thursday the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency released a report showing during fiscal year 2013 the U.S. deported 368,644 people, two-thirds of whom were apprehended at the border. According to ICE, 98 percent of people deported met one of the agency’s civil enforcement priorities.
Obama was not asked about the deportations during his press conference.

 

[jmdrake]

Its more that it tells us that the NSA is run by rubberhose cryptographers, rather than real nerds.

LOL. Sad but true.