(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Fuck.

Short version: cracking D-H key exchange ("most internet encryption") by brute force when every site uses a different 1024-bit key is unfeasibly hard. But if people are using the SAME 1024-bit key, instead of needing to crack 2^1024 (a number 309 digits long) keys, you just need to crack that one. And that only costs a few hundred million dollars, a year of time, and the knowledge of which 1024-bit key to crack. Guess what most common TLS and SSH implementations do? They use a specific key across all installations, which can be pulled out of the installer.

So it's believed that the NSA have cracked the specific keys used by lots of common software, which lets them read the encrypted traffic sent to and from those programs.

Comments

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

The recent ES revelations were merely disappointing to me, I expect our intelligence agencies to ignore any and all laws regarding privacy. The Patriot Act gave them carte blanche. I assume they can read anything I write, anywhere. I had hoped Obama would muzzle them, but he seems unable or unwilling to challenge the American intelligence junta.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

For me, this "fuck" is less about the lawbreaking by reading traffic and more about the introduction of the ABILITY to do so.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Yep. At this point, we assume that the intelligence communities in the developed world are extralegal. If it is technically possible to do so, they will do it. This is a discovery that a lot more is technically possible than previously assumed, so sensible estimates about what they have access to have dismally and drastically expanded.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

At this point, we assume that the intelligence communities in the developed world are extralegal.

They always have acted that way, even when horse travel was the norm. Why stop now?

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

More funding, infrastructure, and tools.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

That only makes their gadgets cooler. Oh, and given that the Space Race was pretty much a race to gather intelligence, I don't think the NSA's shopping list could ever outdo NASA's from the 1960s onward.

[jayblanc.livejournal.com]

The additional bullet point here, is China probably has them too.

[jayblanc.livejournal.com]

Also, right now the Russian Mafia will be reconfiguring their botnets for distributed prime number generation.

If you have nothing to hide ...

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

... you have nothing to fear! :D

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

It's a bit like the ongoing competition between disease-causing life forms and the life forms that suffer the former. If all of us stopped having sex, many diseases would be extinct; so too, though, would we be.

I've always been fascinated, therefore, with the encryption techniques that happen in normal-looking communications. If you don't know there's a secret surprise contained within that mp3 of Metallica covering Queen or of that selfie taken outside the Taj Mahal, why would you try to crack it?

There, I think, will be the next avenue of secret comm, now that just about everyone has the bandwidth to send silly pics and songs.

[nsanity-au.livejournal.com]

Sec guy mentioned to me that this is basically old news.

Its pretty similar to logjam - in that you can pre-compute a large part of the factorisation. His opinion is that anyone who's been using 1024 bit DH is asking to be fucked - and has been for a while (against government actors).

Comments in that thread basically state we've known most 1024 bit shit has been vulnerable since 2006 or so.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Depends on the protocol. some protocols require very long keys to be secure. Others can use shorter ones and remain secure. Simply knowing the key length doesn't help[1]


[1]: Unless it's "64" or "32" in which case NO WRONG THIS IS NOT 1990 YOU FOOL but we're not talking about 32 or 64, we're talking about 256 in some cases, 1024 or 4096 in others.