What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

Re:What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works by SAI_Peregrinus on Saturday March 11, 2017 @10:29AM (#13845703)

The NSA is the single largest employer of mathematicians in the US. The Snowden leaks did not include any of the data from the departments actually involved in attacking cryptography. All we really know is that they don't have any breaks for their low-level mass surveillance tools.

Likewise with the CIA. From the 1% of the documents leaked so far, there's no evidence that they have the ability to crack modern encryption. But the documents leaked seem to come from a contractor (or were shared with a contractor) so there are likely internal-use-only tools with greater capability than shown in this leak.

That's not to say that they definitely have ways to break modern crypto, just that we can't prove that they don't given the material publicly known so far.

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Re:What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works by TillE on Saturday March 11, 2017 @12:02PM (#13846107)

It's fairly difficult to do anything useful with ultra-secret magic decryption tools. You can passively observe, but taking any action, even subtle indirect action, means you're eventually going to alert a target to your capabilities.

Anyway, these are extraordinarily difficult problems which may not have good solutions outside of quantum computing. You can throw all the smart people and computing power in the world at a problem and still come up with almost nothing.

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