Fortunately, those slides leaked. The lower levels talked about cryptanalysis and supercomputers. The TS/SCI/ECI stuff said they were backdooring crypto at the company level using FBI locally and CIA/ISA foreign. Also note their own Type 1 systems allow these ciphers with most sensitive stuff and EKMS using a variation of Photorus called Firefly. Safe bet that good implementations of the stuff still work.

That's a lot of detail, which I'm not familiar with as a causal observer, but its irrelevant.

The slides show the capabilities of one layer of the onion, but its surely naive to assume that's everything?

A total mathematical factoring break is a holy grail. I mean, they made a hollywood movie about this! In the 90s!

Sneakers: "There isn't a government on this planet that wouldn't kill us all for that thing." Obviously, that's a movie, not real life, but the sentiment is valid.

It's possible. Yet, someone has to be able to use that stuff. The Sentry Eagle leaks showed that, as I predicted, they developed most of this stuff in Special Access Programs that compartmentalize things away from even TS clearance. Then, as capabilities are developed, people with TS/SCI clearances are briefed on one or more based on their need to know. Some are so high up they get briefed on all of them. That was Sentry Eagle:

https://leaksource.info/2014/10/17/sentry-eagle-nsa-core-sec...

As you can see, the descriptions represent their most guarded secrets that can do the gravest damage. There could be an extra layer that basically has that one fact in it. I doubt it given how many different angles of attack & severity these docs cover. We also saw that predicted damage adding up after the releases of such leaks. It's more believable given it's the exact kinds of things I'd expect a post-9/11 agency to be doing if they couldn't break RSA, etc. They'd do it anyway for deniability but these are so secret they'd rather let targets go to preserve them. The secrecy level was already tight enough to cover preserving RSA so long as insiders on highest levels kept quiet.

Last part they didn't play so well. ;)

My thing with this argument is that not only would you have to keep your entire organization in the dark (possible, see response to Snowden) but also have to successfully recruit every academic in that space, nationally and internationally, in order to prevent them from also coming to the same conclusion. Yes it's possible, and the tinfoil hatter in me wants to think it's true, but there's too many moving parts for me to think it likely.

>keep your entire organization in the dark

I think employees of the NSA will be used to the idea of compartmentalization.

> successfully recruit every academic

Why that ridiculously high bar?

Original article estimates 100 mathematicans have examined factoring in detail. Googling says NSA has 600 on staff. Maybe they just did a lot of work on the problem. Also, a large dedicated group may outperform the scattered efforts distributed throughout the research community.

> there's too many moving parts for me to think it likely.

Guess you're right, it'd be like as if they [insert implausibly complex project which the Snowden leaks showed they actually do.]

from all the Snowden leaks it seems pretty apparent they couldn't break encryption... but it's been a while since then so who knows now