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 is about economics. The attacks on crypto systems have complexities, and still at the end of the day they require things like raw calculation power. Could they break even single 16384-bit RSA key pair? Probably yes, but they wouldn't be doing anything else on that year. It would be simply way too uneconomical.

Presented by Spiegel are internal services that are designed on purpose to be more economical. They exploit more bad implementations. It doesn't really matter as long as the dirty tricks get the work done.

Also, NSA seems to troll for targets from the vicinity of their targets of interest. It is again more economical, and can be just as revealing. The risk there is that the broken target has nothing of use. The real movie style "let's break the encryption keys" stuff is done for sure targets when they get the extremely rare high value target on platter.

>>erglkj+fq
> Could they break even single 16384-bit RSA key pair? Probably yes

There is no known algorithm that can break a properly generated RSA key of that size - the work required with GNFS is equivalent to brute forcing a symmetric key of something like 280 bits. Anything that could do that should be able to break even 4096 bit RSA keys (~144 bit security) pretty much instantaneously, and their problems with PGP pretty heavily imply they cannot do that.