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
Here is yet another example of an unprovoked comment pushed to the top of a forum promoting the idea that three letter agencies like the NSA are incompetent and no better than the public sector at what they do, and that we don't need to worry about them. Go back to bed America, everything is OK.

Just like the rest of the government, the NSA is not a monolithic entity with no separation of concerns. There are people who clean the floor and people who are at the extreme cutting edge of research.

Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

>>colord+D6
Of course we need to worry about them? Even by what acamedia knows, it's pretty bad right now for security and encryption in practice.

The belief that the NSA is at the extreme cutting edge and just so far ahead is exactly what stops us from making iterative, simple improvements on the technology we use. It's plain unhelpful, and as the data suggests, probably wrong.

(The separation of concerns part is hilarious. Remember, this is the same agency where Snowden managed to wget -r their wiki and various other databases and then go on an extended vacation unnoticed.)

>>revela+27
The only data we have points to that the NSA is ahead of the academic community, from differential cryptanalysis onwards.