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| Author |
Message |
raven
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New NSA computer to break PGP?
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Oct 12 02:02 UTC 1994 |
I read somewhere that the NSA has a new supercomputer with 512,000
Cray CPUs that can break a PGP encrypted message in about 10 minutes.
Does anyone have more info on this latest government intrusion into our
privacy?
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| 38 responses total. |
orinoco
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response 1 of 38:
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Oct 15 16:23 UTC 1994 |
no
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jkrauss
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response 2 of 38:
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Oct 23 15:16 UTC 1994 |
me neither.
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matts
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response 3 of 38:
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Oct 31 03:07 UTC 1994 |
IT shouldn't even have to take that long..
i have heard about this...it is quite amazing
what this thing can do...
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raven
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response 4 of 38:
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Oct 31 17:41 UTC 1994 |
The missing fair winess returns... :-)
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peacefrg
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response 5 of 38:
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Nov 10 18:20 UTC 1994 |
I heard about this computer. Supposedly the secret service and cia use it to
check up on certain netusers. National security my ass.
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doorknob
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response 6 of 38:
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Nov 21 18:32 UTC 1994 |
The NSA is a branch of the CIA, the communications and elint branch, really.
Because of this they are bound to operate under the CIA charter.
They CIA charter makes it illegal for them to operate inside the United
States, undertake operations against US citizens, or make arrests.
Not that this ever stoped them before...
Case anyone cares, their Washington adress isn't there home. They really
run out of Ft. Meade, which is an Army base. Was does this bother me...
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scuzz
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response 7 of 38:
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Mar 20 19:01 UTC 1996 |
thatz scary, I think I'm going to lock the doorz (N.S.A.)[Ciz a bunch of
overpowered freaks anyway.. What are they doing with the monies we give
them.?
Use it to take away our privacies? I say we rebel...!!
.end
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insur
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response 8 of 38:
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May 24 16:42 UTC 1997 |
I have heard something along these lines, and it is not surprising. Until
one-time key pads and such are usable (i.e. mathematically impossible to
break), then any government with enough money can just build a faster and
better machine to break any cryptography that gets in their way. DES can be
broken very easily by the FBI, so it is not surprising that NSA decided to
take on PGP.
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srw
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response 9 of 38:
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May 25 15:53 UTC 1997 |
One-time pads are already impossible to break.
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font
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response 10 of 38:
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Jul 24 04:46 UTC 1997 |
But still: if it is so #%#%& easy for them to break, then why is the
government scared of incription? There must be something that's unbreakable,
or the government wouldn't care.
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agent86
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response 11 of 38:
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Nov 24 08:43 UTC 1997 |
Ok, seeing as this thread isn't long dead, I will take this one on:
short answer: Speed. Speed is very important if you are going to play puppet
master to a country. Never forget that this country's intelligence agencies
are responsible for the infamous COINTELPRO operations.
The only truly safe system is one time pads based on something completely
random like atmospheric noise, and the simple fact is that one time pads are
rather difficult to deal with, so for now I play by Moscow rules...
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agent86
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response 12 of 38:
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Nov 24 08:47 UTC 1997 |
By the way, I find it hard to believe that even the NSA could get a computer
with 512,000 Cray CPU's, for two reasons. First, it would soak their budget
for like two years, leaving them no money to buy donuts or porno mags, and
second, I don't think Cray has that kind of manufacturing capability. Cray
afterall, is a company with a history of supply problems and near
bankruptcies...
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thwarted
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response 13 of 38:
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Feb 18 06:47 UTC 1998 |
View hidden response.
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glyciren
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response 14 of 38:
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Apr 24 00:41 UTC 1998 |
I am doing a project on privacy, and i have never heard of one-time pads
before. I was wondering if someone who understands them well could inform
me, or send me the URL of a web site to check out (glyciren@geocities.com).
Thanx
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morpheus
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response 15 of 38:
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May 27 19:54 UTC 1998 |
One time pad just means that for each new communications session, a new
passcode (encryption function) us used. For these to eb random, you
need to make sure that the passcode ISN'T generated by the computer.
Random power fluctuations, atmospheric noise, solar flares, etc are all
good things to base true random number generators on (as opposed to
pseudo-random generators, which base their output on the computers
internal clock or something similiar. Time is the absolute worst thing
to use as a password, for obvious reasons.
It seems that the NSA does in fact have the capability to crack PGP,
though they haven't revealed how quickly they can do it. Craig N.,
otherwise known in hacker circles as MinorThreat, writer of the famous
wardialer program ToneLoc, had a PGP key that was compromised by the
NSA when he went to trial. Full details can be found on his website,
http://www.paranoia.com/~mthreat. This doesn't mean you shouldn't
encrypt your communications, though. It simply means that you should
use the maximum allowable key-length.
I begin to wonder why we trust the NSA. They have even helped
compromise internal government communications. :-[
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occam
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response 16 of 38:
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Feb 6 04:06 UTC 1999 |
RE: #9 I have always believed that every thing is crackable, and I still
stand behind that. One time pads may be extremely complex, and
random, thus making them very hard to crack, but consequently making them
hard to handle/use. They are not uncrackable. It may be beond our
current resources, but it is not uncrackable.
RE: #10 Because they can't devote the time to crack every encrypted
message. They also know that eventually encryption will eventually
surpass their current computing power, and they will have to make a new
system.
RE: #12 Guess they'll have trouble upgrading, cuz cray is now aout of
buisness. They'll have to start all over again...
RE: #15 How do we know they haven't compromised other nations
communications. we just havent heard about it yet.
--Occam
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mouze
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response 17 of 38:
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Apr 15 16:50 UTC 1999 |
I belived that there is no real privacy act because every g@# damn nation are
to nosy about everybody's privacy....
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morpheus
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response 18 of 38:
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Apr 26 02:41 UTC 1999 |
yeah, true, it is kind of amusing to see how business-like all these
intelligence organizaitons are about other people spying on them :-)
Occam, you are right about crypto surpassing computing power, but we have
absolutely no way to know exactly how much cracking power the NSA, or who
knows maybe even more secretive organizations have. Therefore, I say go opcver
the deep end with your cryptography.
You missed my point, however. The _job_ of the NSA is to spy on other
counties. That's what they get billions in tax money for. Therefore, I sure
hope that they actually manage to crack other governments communications. But,
it is important to note that it is not the NSA's place to spy on the
government of the United States, however. To much power may be vested in the
NSA. Who watches the watchers.
?
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hc
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response 19 of 38:
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Apr 26 21:13 UTC 1999 |
Jus two quick points - the real question about the NSA is what sort of
advances in cryptanalitic techniques they may have made. Once you get nito
larger keys, even 128bit keys, brute force cracking becomes impractical, no
matter what your budget it.
Besides, I thought that part of the NSAs mandate was to worry about the
security of internal government communications. As such, I don't see how
anyone could tell if they were spying on communications. Hell, it took
academic cryptographers something like 15 years just to figure out why the
NSA tweaked DES's S-boxes back when DES was being made a standard.
(They made them more secure againtst cryptanalitic techniques that no one
outside of the NSA even knew about at the time.)
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morpheus
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response 20 of 38:
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May 5 00:51 UTC 1999 |
oh yeah... I forgot to put what I intended to into my last reply :-)
(Funny how my brain works)
One time keys _are_ uncrackable, just so long as you don't put any checksum
type information into the encoded message. I won't even bother explaining this
further (though I can if anyone doesn't get it).
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morpheus
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response 21 of 38:
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May 6 06:55 UTC 1999 |
okay, sorry, I gotta post one more thing (yeah, it would have been good
if on one hand I had posted this all at once, and on the other my conf
settings hadn't gotten fried recently, causing me to reread this stuff :-)
my (hopefully) final point is (drumroll, please): CRAY IS NOT OUT OF BUSINESS.
I want to know where in the world people get the idea that htey are. Cray is
very much alive and number-crunching.
As I recall, it was bought in 1996 by SGI for $740 million or so, and is still
producing computers today if anyone is actually confused about this, check
out cray.com -- duh!)
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raven
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response 22 of 38:
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Jul 21 19:54 UTC 1999 |
The NSA may well be engaging in domestic spying through project echelon
which is a network of snoping stations in England and New Zeland <sp?>
that share a common database with NSA computers. Check out Covert
Action Quarerly online for more info, or put echelon into a search
engine.
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gravitia
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response 23 of 38:
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Oct 2 19:31 UTC 2000 |
How is it possible to break PGP? I thought that it would require brute,
brute force because you need to find the two prime factors of a really big,
phat number.. I heard that they would need something like thre trillion times
the expectancy of the universe to crack a single code... Any ideas?
Thanx
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gravitia
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response 24 of 38:
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Oct 4 01:27 UTC 2000 |
Actually, I just thought of something else - What is the chance of the number
that PGP chooses not being prime? I heard that it doesn't actually perform
a complete analysis - takes too long. So if the number isn't a prime, it's
far easier to crack.
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