zlacker

>>Fabian+(OP)
I mostly read this thinking "good news". No, seriously, the documents suggest that the NSA hasn't made fundamentally important advances in decryption or uncovered significant weaknesses that academia doesn't know about. Now, that's not too much of a reassurance, because what academia (and the NSA) know is that HTTPS is in pretty terrible state, end-point security remains a significant problem, IPSec is a terrible protocl and so on.

It does raise the question what all the mathematicians are doing at NSA, and why they don't seem to have come up with any meaningful results. Suggests they are a waste of money, but then that's all of the NSA.

I suggest all of you check the original material (powerpoints w/ screenshots). A lot of people here suffer from the action movie mentality where they think the NSA is not like any other government agency, i.e. inefficient, behind the times, filled with horrible middle managers, deadweight, .. you get the idea. Things like the enterprise Java web interface, the CSV mass data export and "genericIPSec_wrapper.pl" can quickly dispel that myth.

>>revela+95
Or at the very least they have compartmentalized serious mathematical cryptanalytic capabilities.

For instance:

* We know that the NSA has a novel md5 collision capability since they have used it in their malware. None of the Snowden docs, that I have seen, have talked about this.

* It is likely based on public research that the NSA can break 1024-bit RSA, but this has not showed up in the documents either.

My personal belief is that we are missing compartments dealing with cryptanalysis because Snowden did not have access to them. His work and access were focused on Computer Network Operations and not cryptanalysis.

>>EthanH+L5
It's plausible based on public research that any well-funded adversary can break 1024-bit RSA. You should assume 1024-bit RSA is simply broken.

>>tptace+Yd
Yes and given that I'm kinda surprised we haven't seen any docs talking about breaking 1024-bit RSA. That should have been their bread and butter, at least as far as DNI is concerned, a few years ago.

>>EthanH+8e
What 'yuhong said: it could be expensive, with NSA having the capability to break only one every couple months. They might need to carefully coordinate which keys they break, in which case it would be an important secret which CA keys were broken.

>>tptace+de
Do you think that the NSA would bother breaking CA keys? We know that they have shadow certificates and have much success infiltrating CAs to steal their keys and that they have been able to forge them without having to break the keys (via the previously unknown MD5 collision - as they did for Stuxnet. Seems to me like there are more valuable certs to go after (diplomats' certs, smartcard certs, OS update certs, ...).