[4351] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] NSA: Possibly breaking US laws,
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (PRIVACY Forum mailing list)
Mon Sep 9 12:14:25 2013
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 08:51:54 -0700
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NSA: Possibly breaking US laws, but still bound by laws of
computational complexity
http://j.mp/1cZ2swi (Shtetl-Optimized)
That, of course, raised the extremely interesting question of what
"groundbreaking capabilities" the Director of National Intelligence
was referring to. I said my personal guess was that, with ~99%
probability, he meant various implementation vulnerabilities and
side-channel attacks-the sort of thing that we know has compromised
deployed cryptosystems many times in the past, but where it's very
easy to believe that the NSA is ahead of the open world. With ~1%
probability, I guessed, the NSA made some sort of big improvement in
classical algorithms for factoring, discrete log, or other
number-theoretic problems. (I would've guessed even less than 1%
probability for the latter, before the recent breakthrough by Joux
solving discrete log in fields of small characteristic in
quasipolynomial time.)
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
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