That's with a recommendation of using RC4.
Head on over to the Wikipedia page for SSL/TLS and then decide if you want rc4 to be your preference when trying to defend against a adversary with the resources of a nation-state.
Cheers,
Harry
So even if Goog or Yahoo encrypt their data between DCs, what stops
the NSA from decrypting that data? Or would it be done simply to make
their lives a bit more of a PiTA to get the data they want?
-Mike
Markhov chain text generators are cheap. Rather than amping up the crypto, why not bury them under heaping piles of steaming bullshit?
After all, it would be the patriotic thing to do. Not only would you be helping employ your fellow network engineers (someone has to increase the size of the effluent pipes), you would be boosting manufacturing (disks for storage, high-end network gear for capture, mainframes and asics for filtering and analysis) and helping the much-maligned coal industry ensure its future prospects (that gear isn't built from electron sipping Atom CPUs, you know!).
--lyndon
That's with a recommendation of using RC4.
it’s also with 1024 bit keys in the key exchange.
Money. The better the encryption the more it costs to crack. With forward
security you can even protect against your private key leaking.
In short, you can raise the stakes and make it economically unfeasible for
even the NSA.
John
John Souvestre \- New Orleans LA \- \(504\) 454\-0899Head on over to the Wikipedia page for SSL/TLS and then decide if you
want rc4 to be your preference when trying to defend against a
adversary with the resources of a nation-state.
i got hit with the clue bat on this one.
we have kinda settled on allowing rc4 for smtp as the least preferred.
if we did not it would fall back to cleartext.
otoh, for web, all browsers can do better, so we don't allow rc4
ykmv
randy
So even if Goog or Yahoo encrypt their data between DCs, what stops
the NSA from decrypting that data? Or would it be done simply to make
their lives a bit more of a PiTA to get the data they want?-Mike
I'm just gonna toss this URL out here...
http://www.gdc4s.com/Documents/Products/SecureVoiceData/NetworkEncryption/KG-530_Price_2-1-2012.pdf
and note the terms and conditions for purchase:
General Terms & Conditions
Delivery dates for all products will be established by General Dynamics
at the time of order acceptance.
All specifications, products and pricing are subject to change or
discontinuance at anytime without notice.
Prior written approval from the National Security Agency (General Dynamics
will submit request) and a current
COMSEC account is required for all purchases
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to
think about what it means to put encryption
technology into the network that requires
written approval from the NSA to purchase...
Matt
My bet is that when the said the were "partially" capable of intercepting things,
that means that they haven't broken any of the usual suspects in a spectacular
way, but instead are using anything they can think of to do what they want to
do. So all of the known crypto vulnerabilities, backdoors, breakins, etc, etc are
added to the "partial" bucket. And it wouldn't surprise me that that "partial" is
an impressive amount, because so much of internet security is a big old maginot
line.
Mike
Better leverage quantum encryption tech to exchange those symmetric keys
securely; I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has DH, DSA, and RSA key
exchange schemes defeated or backdoored.
RC4 while not a particularly strong cipher may be strong enough
cryptography to dissaude the NSA, until the matter comes up to budgeting,
and they get a few hundred billion extra in taxpayer money allocated in
order to get their truckload of ASICs live for rapidly brute-forcing RC4
keys, or AES keys, or $cipher_of_the_day_keys.
With near certainty, there would be more invasive methods of attack
available that do not require beating the actual cipher algorithm, and they
would exploit any available options --- figure out which devices are
responsible for doing the encryption, and compromise the security of those
instead.
oh RC4 may be strong enough otherwise, but the cryptosystem or library that
actually implements the AES RC4 or whatever key/cipher scheme, weak. It's
also entirely possible, the implementation you get of RC4, AES, RSA,
etc... will contain subtle backdoors in the library, that reduce the
cipher strength to a level far less.