Re:Edward Snowden Q&A
by richardw on Monday June 17, 2013 @02:51PM
(#5895129)
Amongst other things, I took the fact that the NSA can't break encryption from the Q&A - that they'll usually attack the endpoints rather than trying to brute-force it (or use secret NSA math orders of magnitude better than us peasants have). To me that's pretty significant.
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Re:Edward Snowden Q&A
by dragonwriter on Monday June 17, 2013 @02:59PM
(#5895175)
> Amongst other things, I took the fact that the NSA can't break encryption from the Q&A - that they'll usually attack the endpoints rather than trying to brute-force it
That doesn't imply that they can't break encryption, it just means that usually they have faster/easier options.
He said that strong encryption was one of the few things we can rely on. That's new information.
True, but it does essentially mean that what the public considers to be "strong" crypto is not secretly broken by the NSA in such a way that they can decrypt communications in realtime or en masse.
Re:Edward Snowden Q&A
by dragonwriter on Monday June 17, 2013 @05:28PM
(#5896062)
> True, but it does essentially mean that what the public considers to be "strong" crypto is not secretly broken by the NSA in such a way that they can decrypt communications in realtime or en masse.
Or, at least, that they are monitoring enough data that if they had to decrypt all of it in realtime, it would overtax their computing resources, so that they minimize the burden by going after the cleartext at the source when they have the capacity to get at it that way.