Although the experts quoted only mention 1024-bit keys as targets of attack, the particular paragraph that Thomas mentioned really seems to suggest that RSA in general may be within reach. The worst problem is the last two sentences:
> Luckily for those using encryption, the numbers in question are so long that they can only be factored down to their prime numbers with an extremely large amount of computing power. Unluckily for those using encryption, government agencies in the U.S., Norway, and around the globe are keenly interested in computers designed to excel at exactly this purpose.
This doesn't mention anything about key lengths, but in a sense key lengths are nearly the whole story with regard to the feasibility of brute-force attacks against RSA. Particularly, both sentences refer to "those using encryption" as an undifferentiated class put at risk by this sort of project, and that's one thing that particularly suggests that all of RSA is at risk.
I do believe that is an aggressive reading of the paragraph, out of its context, and that "malpractice" is unfair.
The paragraph you quoted is followed, after just a single intervening paragraph, by this, which I would argue speaks explicitly and accurately to your point:
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A very important question remains: What exactly could WindsorBlue, and then WindsorGreen, crack? Are modern privacy mainstays like PGP, used to encrypt email, or the ciphers behind encrypted chat apps like Signal under threat? The experts who spoke to The Intercept don’t think there’s any reason to assume the worst.
“As long as you use long keys and recent-generation hashes, you should be OK,” said Huang. “Even if [WindsorGreen] gave a 100x advantage in cracking strength, it’s a pittance compared to the additional strength conferred by going from say, 1024-bit RSA to 4096-bit RSA or going from SHA-1 to SHA-256.”
Translation: Older encryption methods based on shorter strings of numbers, which are easier to factor, would be more vulnerable, but anyone using the strongest contemporary encryption software (which uses much longer numbers) should still be safe and confident in their privacy.
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If someone read a sentence saying encryption users are unlucky that the U.S. government is buying supercomputers to crack encryption, which used RSA as an example of something the government wanted to crack, and concluded that this means RSA is broken, they would be cleared of this misreading within a few paragraphs, no?
We are diligent in our reporting, research, editing, and fact checking; this piece involved no small number of staffers doing all of those things and more. A term like "malpractice" we take seriously, but seems to have been tossed off a bit casually here.
There are other quotes in the article that are also presented without enough context to avoid misleading. For instance, you can see speculation in this thread about the utility of this system for breaking "signatures" on updates --- but again, that's only possible if the systems in question are already using weak cryptography.
I stand by my criticism of the article. The paragraph I quoted was poorly constructed, and I think the narrative subtext of the whole piece is "worry that the USG is going to subvert all mainstream cryptography". That narrative is extraordinarily harmful. As someone who has done some recent pro-bono training for at-risk people, it's hard enough to get people to adopt best practices without having to beat back concerns that all the effort is for naught.
I further agree with everyone else here who have pointed out that without the documents, or at least far more of them, or far more comments from experts than are present in the article, this story isn't providing much value. It's not exactly a secret that the USG IC invests heavily in compute for these purposes. What have we really learned here?
You criticize a reference to RSA-4096 as implying RSA-2048 is weak. That reference was made in a quote by bunnie huang, a security researcher, who, like us, was using it to illustrate a broader point, with no insinuation that 2048 is weak. The quote was surrounded by higher level paragraphs from us saying, again, that contemporary crypto should be safe from WindsorGreen.
If we were advancing that narrative — that crypto is useless or will soon be rendered useless — I can see why you'd be concerned. But you have to blow past explicit, lengthy blocks of text saying the opposite of that, and ignore them, to come to that conclusion.
(I'm also not sure why we'd promote that narrative when we ourselves put a lot of effort into crypto education, here's just from Micah Lee and the video team that works with him, only a portion of what I'm talking about: https://theintercept.com/staff/micah-lee/ )
I'm not sure why I'm meant to care about the work you've done to educate people about cryptography, or how that's germane to the discussion. I assume The Intercept is broadly supportive of cryptography. That doesn't mean you can't write a bad story about it, or even that your incentives will tend to keep you from doing that --- those incentives, after all, are mostly about growing a readership, just like any other publication.
40000 CUDA cores are much slower and more constrained than 40000 CPU cores.
The paragraph you quote was intended to give an overview of one type of work a machine like WindsorGreen might do, in broad terms. While it's true we mention RSA as a very basic example of the sort of thing a government would be /interested/ in breaking, we also specifically quote a security researcher saying WindsorGreen “might also have applications for things like … breaking older/weaker (1024 bit) RSA keys” and then quote another (bunnie) saying "“Even if [WindsorGreen] gave a 100x advantage in cracking strength, it’s a pittance compared to the additional strength conferred by going from say, 1024-bit RSA to 4096-bit RSA or going from SHA-1 to SHA-256.”
It's really not clear to me how the piece "puts forward a narrative that the USG is collaborating with IBM to build supercomputers that would break all of RSA" -- indeed, it specifically says this would be of use primarily against 1024-bit RSA.
That said, I'm definitely curious how you think the piece could have framed this more obviously for the lay reader.
(If it's not clear, I work at The Intercept.)