The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center

Originally posted by cavtrooper7
I wonder how many "White Hats" are in the NSA?Or are they all Cabal?

I think it'd be safe to say there's white hats almost everywhere. If there wasn't the world would probably be in a lot worse of a state than it is now.

reply to post by speculativeoptimist

Someone has actually developed some 10 million dollar quantum computer but it has limited bits or something and other experts cast serious doubts on its "quantumness", if you will. I think it might have been made for NASA or a government agency as a prototype but the specifics escape me, I didn't pay too much attention after seeing the doubts.

However, as this is a cutting-edge and largely unknown tech, I think it might take them quite a while to work out how to use and program it, excepting black projects and decades of secrecy and large dollar budgets. The future is ours dammit!
ETA And I'm sure the black hat dudes will have quantum nano viruses by then. *crosses fingers for luck*

reply to post by speculativeoptimist


Thank you for the update on this, I completely forgot about it.

We should all start sending messages by mail again. Hahah

reply to post by LightSpeedDriver


FWIW, at one time the IEEE was "told" by NSA to stop publishing articles/comments on a very interesting line of attack against prime number based encryption schemes back in the '70s, as I recall. It was a stink at the time.

Following the thing at Redstone in 1996 (or thereabouts - it was after the Clipper chip debacle) we guessed that they had either completed that work or had done so as early as the late '70s when IEEE dropped it.

reply to post by tooo many pills

My pleasure tmp, this one is right up ATS's alley.

spec

Originally posted by LightSpeedDriver
reply to post by speculativeoptimist

 

Worrying news indeed. It wasn't so long ago Hilarious Clinton said the new war is an information war, or something similar. As for the Internet being stored, I think they have been doing that for a while, this is just their latest future-proof upgrade but the encryption thing bugs me.

In my limited knowledge of encryption basics there are only 3 ways to do it (discounting a flaw in the algorithm or a backdoor)

1 Supercomputers that can exhaust the whole keyspace quickly (which still would require some kind of scanning to pick out the right key/decrypted message, which in itself could be a mammoth task depending if human language is in the un-encrypted message)
2 A new technology such as quantum computing that uses techniques unknown to the rest of the world.
3 Somehow gaining access (covertly) to everyones password, private key, security certificate or similar.

In any case, great find and definitely something to bear in mind.

edit on 16/3/12 by LightSpeedDriver because: Typo

edit on 16/3/12 by LightSpeedDriver because: Clarification

Almost certainly #3 is the actual solution these days, except that they can't gain access to everybody's password at once. The data center has the infrastructure for the anayltical programs which then feed the human analyst's workstations which then are used to decide on the targets for #3. Actually applying #3 can be labor intensive, e..g attempting to hack into one specific target's device or place an intercept/silent proxy so that browsing will result in installation of a trojan exploiting an otherwise undisclosed vulnerability.

Obviously I do not have specific insider knowledge, because if I did I wouldn't be able to write anything.

Originally posted by speculativeoptimist

I think that soon, even those codes that can take years to work out, may become child's play with developing technology. No doubt they will work on a new form of coding, but it always become tit for tat, so to say, although if I had to bet, I'd say they have some tech that we don't even know about.

Unless that "tech" works in a timeless or immensely time compressing fashion, I would be much, much more concerned with other forms of cryptological intervention.

Originally posted by mbkennel


Obviously I do not have specific insider knowledge, because if I did I wouldn't be able to write anything.

Why not? It's been happening for decades.

This is exactly like the book Digital Fortress. The new NSA supercomputer will be capable of breaking AES with ease. Still gives me comfort to think that brute force is the only practical way to target AES which the NSA is doing. They really need to increase the number of rounds on AES as Bruce Scheiner has pointed out as well.

Originally posted by THE_PROFESSIONAL
This is exactly like the book Digital Fortress. The new NSA supercomputer will be capable of breaking AES with ease. Still gives me comfort to think that brute force is the only practical way to target AES which the NSA is doing. They really need to increase the number of rounds on AES as Bruce Scheiner has pointed out as well.

Wasn't an article published like 2 or 3 years ago saying they unapproved AES256 for top secret clearance and still approved AES128? I faintly remember some discussion saying maybe AES256 had weaknesses. I haven't been using AES at all because Schneier said it was too well structured and made him nervous. Older symmetric ciphers and big RSA pubkeys are probably much safer than a new cipher everyone uses.

[EDIT] There are interesting related-key attacks against AES256, because its key schedule is too weak. This is of practical interest only for people using AES in strange ways, which I really shouldn't be doing anyway.

I can't remember anyone unapproving anything in connection with this and a quick look suggests that any unapproval is a figment of my imagination.

reply to post by PulsusMeusGallo


Yes AES-128 is academically more stronger than AES-256. With the NSA trying to go through systems it is better to use AES-128 with a very very long passkey.

The first key-recovery attacks on full AES due to Andrey Bogdanov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Christian Rechberger were published in 2011.[22] The attack is based on bicliques and is faster than brute force by a factor of about four. It requires 2126.1 operations to recover an AES-128 key. For AES-192 and AES-256, 2189.7 and 2254.4 operations are needed, respectively.

From the AES wiki

www.wired.com...

"And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted.

According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US."

I can hardly believe it. Is this even possible? Maybe they have 'initial capability' of a quantum computer at their disposal and are actually breaking into RSA and intercepting AES keys. But AES-256 cryptoanalyzed and broken?

Nah.

II'm not going to claim that AES is necessarily secure. But I don't think that there is, or could be, a "breakthrough" that would give the NSA the ability to break the kind of secret-key systems that would reasonably be within the power of modern microcomputer systems.

Instead, I interpret that slip of the tongue - if, indeed, there's any truth to it - as meaning something else.

Generally speaking, encrypted communications today don't involve the exchange of secret keys in advance. (Cracking what's on someone's encrypted hard drive is a different matter, of course.)

Instead, techniques like RSA (exponentiation, factoring), Diffie-Hellman (discrete logarithms), and elliptic curve cryptography are used to exchange keys.

So my guess would be that they've found the "magic screw" - the secret of breaking public-key cryptosystems the nagging fear of which kept GCHQ from putting the technique to work for them back when it was secretly discovered there far in advance of the public rediscovery.

reply to post by PulsusMeusGallo


You are correct. The weakest link in any financial transaction is broken first. If they used RSA to transmit AES then if RSA was broken, they have access to the AES key. This is a very faulty design mechanism. Plus also quantum computing only halves the keyspace I believe for asymetric schemes...

if your wondering why they built this...


hillary clinton spells it out, they are losing the information war (we know it as propoganda).
controlling the internet is the only way they keep the propoganda flowing.

reply to post by THE_PROFESSIONAL


They did mention that a lot of foreign government and military stuff was encrypted with keys less than 128 bits. That would be much more interesting and much more practical.

But they lie so WTF knows.

Originally posted by PulsusMeusGallo
reply to post by THE_PROFESSIONAL

 

They did mention that a lot of foreign government and military stuff was encrypted with keys less than 128 bits. That would be much more interesting and much more practical.

But they lie so WTF knows.

128 bit ain't worth sit. Cutting through that is easy as pi.

I just want to say that I think this is absolutely great. And what a great job the NSA are doing. And this is going to protect the people and everyone else. And that no one should be complaining because this is the best thing to happen for public safety ever. And it's wonderful. And amazing. And I love the NSA and everyone that works there. And...

Yep.

So great.

Woooo.

So happy.... Yay

Originally posted by PulsusMeusGallo

 

They did mention that a lot of foreign government and military stuff was encrypted with keys less than 128 bits. That would be much more interesting and much more practical.

But they lie so WTF knows.

Originally posted by reitze

128 bit ain't worth sit. Cutting through that is easy as pi.

You should have a lustrous cryptological career ahead of you then.

any idea how much storage space it will have because maybe if we got everybody to send tons and tons of messages and whatnot to fill it up im not sure wot they would do if it was full but it would definitely piss them off lol

Originally posted by kamikanazuchi
Saw this last night. The thing that worries me the most is the ability to break encryption with ease.

The NSA at vast expense and illegally building a gigantic facility to record and store ALL information of everyone
as detailed below and including cracking encrypted information by building super duper exoflop computers.

All this is unconstitutional of course and illegal but the corrupt congress and all the other corporate criminals in Washington have it given it the go ahead and unlimited funding in the name of "security".

AlKeda success was not in 9/11 but in morally,socially and financially bankrupting the USA from this "security threat" and in this succeeded spectacularly.

Here is a detailed report.

www.wired.co.uk...


A simple way of defeating them is to encrypt everything in AES 256 and then encrypt the encrypted information AGAIN using AES 256.

They can suck on that for all eternity with their pathetic snooping even with exaflop computers.