Ever wondered how the NSA cracked encryption?

bornkillerbornkiller AdministratorIn your girlfriends snatch
I was always curious how they did it ...... :(
There was never any information on 'how' when Snowden leaked the info, only assumptions until now. Although as dorky as this may sound, I have a raging boner @ the moe. And don't you just hate sites that try to deprive you of downloading their images....fuck them!

Source: http://thehackernews.com/2015/10/nsa-crack-encryption.html


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Yes, it seems like the mystery has been solved.

We are aware of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) powers to break almost unbreakable encryption used on the Internet and intercept nearly Trillions of Internet connections – thanks to the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

However, what we are not aware of is exactly how did the NSA apparently intercept VPN connections, and decrypt SSH and HTTPS, allowing the agency to read hundreds of Millions of personal, private emails from persons around the globe.

Now, computer scientists Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger have presented a paper at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security that advances the most plausible theory as to how the NSA broke some of the most widespread encryption used on the Internet.

According to the paper, the NSA has exploited common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm – a common means of exchanging cryptographic keys over untrusted channels – to decrypt a large number of HTTPS, SSH, and VPN connections.

Diffie-Hellman – the encryption used for HTTPS, SSH, and VPNs – helps users communicate by swapping cryptographic keys and running them through an algorithm that nobody else knows except the sender and receiver.

It is described as secure against surveillance from the NSA and other state-sponsored spies, as it would take hundreds or thousands of years and by them and a nearly unimaginable amount of money to decrypt directly.

However, a serious vulnerability in the way the Diffie-Hellman key exchange is implemented is allowing the intelligence agencies and spies to break and eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.

To crack just one of the extremely large prime numbers of a Diffie-Hellman in the most commonly used 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman keys would take about a year and cost a few hundred Million dollars.

However, according to researchers, only a few prime numbers are commonly used that might have fit well within the agency's $11 Billion-per-year budget dedicated to "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities."

"Since a handful of primes are so widely reused, the payoff, in terms of connections they could decrypt, would be enormous," said Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger in a blog post published Wednesday.

"Breaking a single, 1024-bit prime would allow the NSA to passively decrypt connections to two-thirds of VPNs and a quarter of all SSH servers globally. Breaking a second 1024-bit prime would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to nearly 20% of the top million HTTPS websites. In other words, a one-time investment in massive computation would make it possible to eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections."


Around 92% of the top 1 Million Alexa HTTPS domains make use of the same two primes for Diffie-Hellman, possibly enabling the agency to pre-compute a crack on those two prime numbers and read nearly all Internet traffic through those servers.
According to the duo, this NSA technological project to crack crypto on a scale has "not seen since the Enigma cryptanalysis during World War II."

Comments

  • Fucking hell, fuck me.
  • I saw this on 4chan. I think it boils down to like 20-60% can be intercepted and decrypted that we are aware of with just those one or two vpn primes that they stupidly all use. It's an implementation failure. If they used more primes for the handshake agreement(?) they would need that much more money and processing power.

    Despite this, I have a feeling they are doing something big at the NSA facility. No one remembers how much water they use? It's a fuck ton. I can't remember. It was in an arid state (NV?) and it was a serious drain. I'm not sure if it was because of that alone or partly because of that but the state threatened to cut their water off and made it look like a 4th amendment stand.

    But all that water..... I can't imagine what they are getting up to but money is no issue.
  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    Gen_Why wrote: »
    I saw this on 4chan. I think it boils down to like 20-60% can be intercepted and decrypted that we are aware of with just those one or two vpn primes that they stupidly all use. It's an implementation failure. If they used more primes for the handshake agreement(?) they would need that much more money and processing power.

    Despite this, I have a feeling they are doing something big at the NSA facility. No one remembers how much water they use? It's a fuck ton. I can't remember. It was in an arid state (NV?) and it was a serious drain. I'm not sure if it was because of that alone or partly because of that but the state threatened to cut their water off and made it look like a 4th amendment stand.

    But all that water..... I can't imagine what they are getting up to but money is no issue.
    1.7 million gallons of water each day! Fuck! The data storage and servers must fucking huge to use that much water for cooling. Unless they're generating their own sub station with hydro in that building or maybe they're using it for the largest indoors weed cultivation in the world to belly out the weed market so meth becomes a better financial interest.

  • I actually had to look up what that much water looks like. I think it's about a football field and a half ten feet deep (American.) That's quite a bit but maybe they double flush a lot? Not near as much as I was thinking they would need to run quantum computers or hydrolises based binary systems.
  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    I come to the conclusion they're growing dak ...... just sayin.
  • Shit didn't they have a methlab explosion in one of those innumerable federal agencies? I mean that shit doesn't blow up on its own. You have to be trying to cool it ffs
  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    Gen_Why wrote: »
    Shit didn't they have a methlab explosion in one of those innumerable federal agencies? I mean that shit doesn't blow up on its own. You have to be trying to cool it ffs
    Yah! All large government agency facilities have huge meth labs hidden in them to make all their christmases be white.

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