Re: On what the NSA does with its tech
The impracticability of breaking symmetric ciphers is only a comparatively small part of the overall problem. I see that it can be done only by brute farce myth is live and well. Hint: all major cryptanalytic advances, where governments broke a cypher and general public found out few *decades* later were not of brute-force kind. And if anyone thinks today's hobby/private cryptographers are any smarter (in a relative way) or more intelligent than their counterparts of 100 or 50 years ago (that were in dark for decades) ... well, you are an idiot. Today's crypto will be regarded in 2050 as Enigmas are regarded today. Development does not stop in any particular period just because you live in it and assume you're entitled to absolute knowledge. = end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
Re: On what the NSA does with its tech
At 02:23 AM 8/5/04 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote: The impracticability of breaking symmetric ciphers is only a comparatively small part of the overall problem. Indeed. Following Schneier's axiom, go for the humans, it would not be too hard to involutarily addict someone to something which the withdrawl from which readily compromises any human. Since torture is now legitimized in the US, or its proxies, have a beer (or stronger, etc) Mohammed. Of course, the green card offered to the housecleaning illegal is simpler. Ask Nikky Scarfo. And there's nothing like raping one's children to convince the reticent... particularly if one's halal meal has been doped with various psychopharms.. -- The problem with quantum computing will be coercing the qubits to do you bidding (not just toy problems) without losing their waviness. Not relevent to the nano-args, but your energy consumption calcs do make it clear that Ft Meade will need some awfully big radiators :-) Then again, its not that far from the ocean, a rather extreme heatsink... Still I concede that Ft Meade has no finer features than IBM. But when economics *don't* dictate, as they do everywhere else, one has to ponder. Still, the 'tographers beat the 'analysts, as you say, for sufficiently large keys, and sufficiently different chained ciphers. Don't put all your squeamish ossifrage eggs in one basket, eh? And stay away from Athens, ok?
Re: planet sized processors (Re: On what the NSA does with its tech)
On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 06:16:14PM -0400, Adam Back wrote: The planet sized processor stuff reminds me of Charlie Stross' sci-fi short story Scratch Monkey which features nanotech, planet sized Not a coincidence, as he's been mining diverse transhumanist/extropian communities for raw bits. Kudos to his work, very nicely done. processors which colonize space and build more planet-sized processors. The application is upload, real-time memory backup, and afterlife in DreamTime (distributed simulation environment), and an option of reincarnation. http://www.aleph.se/Trans/ is a bit dated, but is still a very good resource. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpZM2A9BHzEJ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: On what the NSA does with its tech
On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, Hal Finney wrote: As you can see, breaking 128 bit keys is certainly not a task which is so impossible that it would fail even if every atom were a computer. If we really needed to do it, it's not outside the realm of possibility that it could be accomplished within 50 years, using nanotech and robotics to move and reassemble asteroids into the necessary disk. There are easier targets than the symmetric cipher algorithm itself. You may aim at RSA, try to break through the factorization problem, or find another weakness in it. Same for other algorithms of this class. You may aim at the passphrase, as several other people suggested. You may use nanotech to compromise the hardware, and/or to intercept the data. This includes eating and duplicating chips, including key storage tokens; just go layer after layer and rebuild it (or create its virtual image) including the levels of electric charge in the memory cells. How to design a token that would be resistant to nanoprobes? (Perhaps by equipping it with an immune system of nanoprobes of its own?) Quantum computers may be the way to break factoring-related algorithms. Nanotechnology can bring many ways for physical compromising of the targets and their vicinity (the fly on the wall attack). The impracticability of breaking symmetric ciphers is only a comparatively small part of the overall problem.
Re: On what the NSA does with its tech
From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Aug 2, 2004 11:56 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: On what the NSA does with its tech .. What they can do is implement an advanced dictionary search that includes the kind of mnemonic tricks and regexps that folks typically use when coming up with tough passphrases. Cracking Italian anarchist PGP-equipt PDAs in their possession, things like that. Yep. This seems like the practical weak link in a lot of uses of cryptography. It can be made harder in a lot of ways (e.g., upping the iteration count, or doing Abadi's trick of generating a big salt value but not disclosing all of it), but all this ends up with the attacker's extra work linear in the user's extra work. Of course, if the user chooses good passwords, it's a pretty big linear factor, but it's still linear--I double my iteration count, and the attacker doubles his work, though he's always doing a million times as much work as I am. The only really good solution is to use some external device to mediate in password-key generation. But then you've got to make sure that device is always available, or you're unable to get at your data. And if that device is an online server somewhere, then password encryptions become partly traceable. --John Kelsey
Re: On what the NSA does with its tech
On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 20:07:23 +0100, Dave Howe [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: all generalizations are false, including this one. Is this self-referential?
Re: On what the NSA does with its tech
Pete Capelli wrote: On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 20:07:23 +0100, Dave Howe [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: all generalizations are false, including this one. Is this self-referential? yes - some generalizations are accurate - and its also a quote, but I may have misworded it so I didn't quotemark it or supply an attributation :)
Re: On what the NSA does with its tech
On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 11:04:15AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote: [...] The system will consume 10^25 * 60 nanowatts or about 6 * 10^17 watts. Now, that's a lot. It's four times what the earth receives from the sun. So we have to build a disk four times the area (not volume) of the earth, collect that power and funnel it to our computers. Probably we would scatter the computers throughout the disk, which would be mostly composed of solar collectors. (Keeping the disk gravitationally stable is left as an exercise for the student, as is the tradeoff involved in making it smaller but moving it closer to the sun.) If I did my unit conversions right, such a disk would be over 30,000 miles in diameter. So we'll probably get some advance notice - Hey, what's that big-ass thing orbiting around the Moon? -Jack
Re: On what the NSA does with its tech
On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 04:44:58PM -0400, Jack Lloyd wrote: If I did my unit conversions right, such a disk would be over 30,000 miles in Drexler's estimate for computers are coservative (purely mechanical rod logic). SWNT-based reversible logic (in spintronics? even utilizing nontrivial amounts of entangled electron spins in solid state qubits for specific codes?) could do a lot better. So today's secrets perhaps won't be in a few decades. What else is new? Rather, who's passphrase has 128 bits of pure entropy? Certainly not mine. So the weakest link is elsewhere. diameter. So we'll probably get some advance notice - Hey, what's that big-ass thing orbiting around the Moon? By that time the question is rather do you think that's air you're breathing? Check out some of the stuff on http://moleculardevices.org/ you might get a surprise. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp9Ajhh6BqCE.pgp Description: PGP signature
On what the NSA does with its tech
At 02:39 PM 8/2/04 -0400, John Kelsey wrote: This is silly. They have black budgets, but not infinite ones. Given their budget (whatever it is), they want to buy the most processing bang for their buck. Yes. They can't break a 128 bit key. That's obvious. (if all the atoms in the universe were computers... goes the argument). What they can do is implement an advanced dictionary search that includes the kind of mnemonic tricks and regexps that folks typically use when coming up with tough passphrases. Cracking Italian anarchist PGP-equipt PDAs in their possession, things like that. If your keys are random 128, no dice (no pun intended). But if your keys are deterministically derived from something in your head, they can blaze. As well as the SIGINT stuff that takes a lot of DSP cycles. But agreed, and worth repeating, long keys can't be exhaustively searched, if they are truly random. As for WEP, GSM, etc cracking, voice recognition, etc, well, that is suitcase sized / real time stuff for them, if they want it. I imagine that the social network panopticon --eg who'se ever called whom-- might take some serious exabyte datacrunching too, something the bioinformaticists would envy. I don't think I overestimate the adversary when I suggest that he has plenty of uses for fast hardware, and that his hardware can be more than a decade faster thanks to cost being less of a concern, even if his transistors are no smaller/faster than TMSC's or IBM's. - I had never met a mathematician before. He had a good sense of humor, but no matter what you said to him, he was unimpressed. -Knuth
