On 17/03/12 00:35 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
(yay, Bamford is back from the dead)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
the interesting claim:
.... the NSA made an enormous
breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break,
unfathomably complex encryption systems
Well. Any clues? Shrinking this down some:
... For years, one of the hardest shells has been the
Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the
world to encrypt data....
Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the
key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of
cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct
brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those
messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target,
the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and
Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one
time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also
involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And,
boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the
official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis
Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the
capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the
long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands
of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code
breakers were admitting defeat.
So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under
way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working
in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the
world has ever known.
....
Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even
faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another former
senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA’s
machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster
out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against
one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were
moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking
extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and
running.
The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward
the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the
intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and vice chairman and
the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,”
he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was
going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”
In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans’
personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign
secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest
encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal
of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is
encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. “Remember,” says the former
intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been
able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more
of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous
amount of information still in there.” The NSA believes it’s on the verge of
breaking a key encryption algorithm—opening up hoards of data.
That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of
long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken
tomorrow. “Then you can see what they were saying in the past,” he says. “By
extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how
they may do things now.” The danger, the former official says, is that it’s
not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms,
it’s also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as
Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade.
But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed
is everything.
... So after a lot of colour, it is not clear if they can break AES.
Yet. OK. But that is their plan. And they think they can do it,
within their foreseeable future. Maybe soon. Or maybe they can, and
they've managed to get their own agency to at least believe it's in the
future, not now. Or maybe they can at 128, but not larger?
OK, that's a significant factoid - the goal is in sight.
It's also interesting that they are justifying the goal to hoover
everything up as needed for future cryptanalysis material for when they
can break the codes.
iang
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