An interesting scenario just came to mind...
1) RSA intentionally weakens their crypto at the behest of the NSA (this is fairly certain)
2) Chinese hack RSA - the only question is just how thoroughly (a known fact)
Now comes the speculation.
3) China analyzes what they got from RSA and discover the crypto is weaker than expected.
4) Quietly, China also begins to take advantage of this breakable crypto the NSA foisted on US companies and citizens.
5) China deduces why it was done and starts looking for weaknesses in other US crypto products - possibly succeeding, given they have a decent idea what to look for.
Followed by
6) China successfully and quietly penetrates most US defense contractors and financial institutions.
This was taken from Slashdot and it's regarding NSA influence in RSA RNG (read more here
http://www.openbsd.org/crypto.html#prng ).
Now someone with brains in China probably tried checking out things and they might have succeeded because the Crypto were crippled because of NSA. If that is indeed true then not only NSA is checking things out, China is doing the same.
Which leaves us in a very funny situation. You noticed I stopped bothering with SSL and other extension security checks and trying to find ways to keep data safe, it's because it's useless. I can't win and it's going to just get me flagged. In short, you're not safe on the Internet. We're all fucked and doomed.
And we can't do shit for now.
Comments
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/09/19/nsa-sends-letter-to-its-extended-family-to-reassure-them-that-they-will-weather-this-storm/
China and the US have been really heavy on the cyber warfare. China does it to steal industrial secrets, the US to work out china's military secrets.
your scenario is likely.
China has been encouraging it's own CPU architecture based on MIPS. Probably because they knew what we've always suspected, the US has chip-level access to data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
Well that explains it, I was laughing at China efforts to make their own CPU Arch but now it doesn't seem like a bad idea.