Tom Metro wrote:
I haven't looked at reference material to refresh my understanding on
this, so it may be wrong, but my recollection is that a CA compromise
would only facilitate man-in-the-middle attacks.

Certificate escrow is the easiest way for a three-letter agency to obtain site certificates.


This strikes me as a wild assertion and I don't follow the logic.
References?

CRIME and BREACH are examples of SSL side-channel attacks using known text to recover session keys. The more text you have, the more text you have available for making such attacks.

Superficially, it sounds like it could be right, as we've all heard of
attack vectors that make use of known plain text. But the NSA doesn't
*know* what is in a given document.

But they do. For example, there are static data in every Google account sign-in process. If you capture many sessions of SSL-wrapped data and compare them to the clear-text data then you can draw correlations between known plain-text and the cipher-text. You can then apply those correlations to any arbitrary user's sign-in sessions.



Yeah, but why is that useful? If a repeat[1] occurs every 2^64, and you
send a high volume of messages, that means the NSA will be able to
decrypt 2 messages out of 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 messages. That's
assuming they've brute forced one to begin with.

This assumes a truly random spread. Computers don't do truly random numbers.

--
Rich P.
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