The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

I knew all about it, and much more. But not by reading that book - Last month I watched CNN's 1998 documentary about the Cold War. ABSOLOUTELY AMAZING. 24 episodes, each about 50 minutes. Tons of never-seen-before footage and interviews with many of the parties involved in the Cold War (Gorbachev, Castro, Kissinger, Reagan, H. W. Bush, and dozens of other well-informed ministers, ambassadors, spies, soldiers and citizens)

But more importantly, it's fair. It doesn't blame Russia while praising America or vice versa. Bot powers did dreadful things during the Cold War, and this documentary shows them all. After watching it, now I have a very deep respect for CNN and Ted Turner.

It's only available on VHS, and only on eBay (or used, at Amazon). If you don't have a VHS player anymore (who has?), contact me (edit: for download links, not for selling you a VHS player!).

If you're interested in Cold War history and want to know more, watch this definitive series. You won't be disappointed.

I'd recommend Puzzle Palace by James Bamford.

It refers to a number of technologies including DES, SSL and GSM. I suspect also <128bit AES.

The NSA stores everything anyway, because if it can't be decrypted today, it can probably be decrypted tomorrow.

On the positive side, even if the NSA could break AES 256 (or even DES) it is still a relevant and useful algorithm. It's relevant because if I, say, issue an order to storm Wimbledon Common, that order is tactically valid and useful and hence secret for maybe a day or two, after which Wimbledon Common has been taken, and the order no longer has value.

Assuming the symmetric keys are solid, even weaker algorithms will do. On that basis, if AES 256 is only relevant for another 10 years then that's ok to encrypt my documents with, because when something better comes along those documents are probably no longer relevant.

Of course they may still be relevant as evidence if someone wants to come after you.

In closing, a lot of the Wired article is drawn from the book The Shadow Factory, which ends with the start of the construction of the Utah facility. It's interesting reading that also goes into the political side of it.

I doubt they have the computing power or the tools to decypher more complex algorithms, the sheer amount of encrypted data seems to big. occams razor would dictate they are just storing vast amounts of data, maybe mapping communications (eg. mails from afghanistan to the us, etc) and then bruteforcing some of the really interesting stuff. it's not like a us government agency can suddenly leapfrog decades of research in encryption.

From the article's excitement, I would almost guess that they have a working attack against AES, but that sounds extremely unlikely with the amount of scrutiny AES has received. Still, AES is known to have some very clean algebraic properties, and people have wondered since the AES competition whether those would translate into real attacks -- perhaps the NSA has found a way. At least, the discussions about saving data to decrypt later sounds very suggestive of a break on either Triple DES or AES.

But I should say that you wouldn't have to break AES to break HTTPS and read most of the encrypted conversations on the web. In late 2008 a group of academics broke HTTPS by lifting a digital signature from a legitimately-signed document which gave few HTTPS permissions, onto a document which gave them arbitrary permissions. They did this by breaking the MD5 algorithm, and it caused the community to finally excise the last of the MD5 certificates for SHA1 certificates. But the NSA could do the same with the SHA1 algorithm's known weakness, and could then listen in on any man-in-the-middle attack they wanted. How complex is this? Since 2008, we've had an attack which might work in 2^52 operations or so. For the NSA that's approximately nothing. The Cray computer (one which we know the US government has) does roughly 2 petaflops now, or 2^51 operations per second or 2^67 per day. So it's reasonable to believe that, if they move from eavesdropping to active communication, they can already break HTTPS. (There is a risk in this method, however: if someone catches you doing this "in the wild", then they might notice and raise a big stink about it.)

Their exaflop goal would then be 2^85/year, which would be enough to run publicly-known attacks against Triple DES and perhaps to factor known 1024-bit RSA moduli -- for example the Equifax Root CA is 1024 bit RSA. If you could compromise one of those just once, you could issue certificates of your own -- and it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to detect the intrusion. So with exaflop computing, they could seriously just spend a couple weeks breaking an RSA-1024 modulus and launch undetectable man-in-the-middle attacks against everyone.

It's also likely that they've got more efficient attacks than the public researchers have, since they have access not only to the public research but also to a set of well-paid brilliant minds who work on these problems every day, and have been for quite some time. (It would be nice to have some transparency and know just how far they have gotten, but of course they won't even tell us that. I guess that's a bit of a weird question anyway, like asking, "in the odd event that you might want to stab the Internet to death, we would like to know: how large is the largest knife you own?")

If they had some completely unknown attack, I doubt they would leak it during an interview about their new facility... which is going to draw a lot of attention from privacy advocates and tin foil hatters.

Possibilities include:

1. Disinformation. Maybe it's about hashes, either SHA-1 (unlikely since there are known, feasible, collision attacks) or an unknown vulnerability in SHA-2 variants, and the NSA is trying to make people look elsewhere by talking about how they're going to decrypt mountains of old data.

2. GSM. I don't think the entities the NSA cares about consider GSM secure, so I doubt it.

3. RSA, DSA, plain DH. It's no secret that the NSA has been strongly encouraging suite B (EC-based) variants of older ciphersuites. But why would they encourage people to be skeptical about security of existing non-EC public key crypto just a few years after they're able to start cracking it?

4. AES. Nightmare scenario (no replacement in the pipeline).

Perhaps someone else has discovered whatever the vulnerability is, and they're too visible and cannot be coerced into shutting up, but were induced to shut up temporarily; in that case this could be part of a disclosure strategy by the NSA, possibly about a factoring/DLP advance enabling cracking of plain RSA and/or DH.

The article doesn't say anything was cracked, and the "breakthrough" is mentioned when talking about supercomputing. It would take a mind-boggling supercomputing breakthrough to put 128 bit block ciphers at risk. Could this be Bamford trying to sell more books by creating drama?

And spoken not 50ft from the NSA/FBI/CIA booths attending the conference ..

A few years ago I remember reading about this on slashot. If I remember correctly, their electricity bill has something to do with the move as well, as I think the NSA accounts for 1/4 of the electricity supplied to Maryland.

[edit] I looks like I was off, they really just maxed out BG&Es power grid. here's the slashdot article from 09: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/0333202/nsa-to...

As a Mormon who attended BYU in Provo, Utah, I can attest that a very large percentage of the young male population is not only bilingual in common and uncommon languages, but there's a deep sense of patriotism. Universities in Utah are heavily recruited for law enforcement (FBI) and foreign service.

I agree that most of the reason for the Utah location is probably cost, but the demographics are also very unique (and yes, fairly homogeneous as well).

Here's a link to the NPR article from a few days ago:

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/12/148252561/on-utahs-silicon-slo...

And the (empty) HN discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698438

Thank you, I will do this in the future.

I strongly disagree with this.

Wired's articles are reasonably paged, and the complete article is very long. On many devices (eg phones) long pages don't always render well. Additionally, a publication like Wired deserves the page views for the good article.

It is different for publications that only have a paragraph per page.

TL;dr: there is no HN best practice.

HN best practice is to link to the canonical URL for each article,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3571353

and let the user's user agent decide what pagination view to display and how. That often happens automatically on well designed websites. That also helps the Hacker News duplicate submission detector work in its intended way.

From the article, and the premise that massive computing power is being created and required anyway, it sounds much more like a weakness at AES 128-bit that is only practical for a government agency.

It also sounds that they discovered it before 2008, due to the jump in resource timing, i.e. less than 10 years after AES.

Hahaha, think they're gonna tell you? The NSA is by FAR the most secretive govt agency, more so than the NGA, CIA, or any other three letter agency. And the scale of their operations are kinda scary, and probably violate several consitunional rights... But's that's just opinion banter, will we ever really know for sure?

Perhaps it could be something related to:

http://blog.ioactive.com/2012/02/ssl-traffic-analysis-on-goo...

Or some other implementation flaw(s) in TLS.

The point being, there are more ways to break crypto systems than attacking just the algorithm.

FYI: http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/oversight.shtml#oversight5

haha. I hear they pay pretty well too.

edit: why the downvotes? I'm not trollin, they actually pay a percentage above the standard govt pay scale.

Why not try for some place more respectable and apply to Yahoo instead?

...remembering my favorite scene in Good Will Hunting... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw

hold out for something better ;)

Tap -> Acquire -> Store -> Manipulate -> Analyze -> Supply

People will never give a fuck. If they were going to, it would have happened already. Stop waiting.

I'm older than you are, evidently. Over the years, as I've read literature from various eras and traveled to various places, I've learned that people can feel under more constant surveillance, and BE under more constant surveillance, in a small, isolated town or village than as citizens of a modern high-technology state. And yet in 1989 people in several parts of central Europe rose up for freedom--courageously doing so even after the Tian'anmen Square Massacre was a worldwide news story--and defeated the secret police organizations of totalitarian dictatorships. You can still fight for freedom. That takes courage, but you'll find the courage if freedom means that much to you. I'm wondering when the tens of thousands of local uprisings that China reports each year in its official press will coalesce into a national movement for freedom.

I think the govt has already broken quite a few of its own rules, yet smart people from around the world flock to Google, MIT, and the like. National security letters, the Patriot Act, illicit war.

I would love to live in Berlin, but my family is here in the states, and the NSA would still intercept my communications in Germany, anyway.