[Cryptography] Opening Discussion: Speculation on "BULLRUN"

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Fri Sep 6 07:47:10 EDT 2013


On Thu, Sep 05, 2013 at 04:11:57PM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

> If a person at Snowden's level in the NSA had any access to information

Snowden didn't have clearance for that information. He's being described 
as 'brilliant' and purportedly was able to access documents far beyond his 
level by impersonating (using stolen/falsified secrets) higher level officials.

Culling admins and adding the two-eyes rule will cripple the TLAs 
more than it will accomplish anything. 

We're still missing the information which cyphers are now legacy, and
which are still considered useful. I keep seeing PFS being touted,
but there is no evidence yet we can trust PFS to be yet unbroken
though it appears plausible.  

Others are suggesting that public key encryption methods are suspect,
while symmetric encryption has a better story. I'm personally becoming
quite interested in a reliable way to produce secure one-time pads,
using physical entropy sources which have been validated. It would
be interesting to physically/securely exchanging large one-time
pads in one's social network, and reaching farther recipients in
a Retroshare-like (turtle router) model.

It might be useful to combine one-time pads with symmetric encryption,
automatically rekeying every large block of data for high-volume
transfers (e.g. mesh routers) to stretch a one-time pad without
completely losing its properties. The question is how large a block
can be before it leaks enough information about the key.

> that indicated the existence of any program which involved the successful
> cryptanalysis of any cipher regarded as 'strong' by this community then the
> Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the NSA and everyone
> involved in those decisions should be fired immediately and lose their
> pensions.


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