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Comment by ambassador451 | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly what they would say if they actually had found a way to break encryption.

Sad to see wired.com becoming another mouthpiece for the government like other mainstream media.

I don't believe they can break most forms of crypto head on, but they can certainly exploit a lot of flaws (either errors in the implementation or flaws in either the infrastructure it runs on or physical/human factors).

It's an open question whether strong crypto used inappropriately makes people do things they wouldn't otherwise. If you know all comms are monitored, and don't ever say anything incriminating on the phone, you're better off than someone who has an unbreakable encrypted phone but is talking to an informant with a recorder on the other end.

It was broken before it hits the shelf.

"They do not use(release) code, they can't crack"

Are you alleging the NSA is violating its mandate by deliberately leaving top secret information vulnerable?

Not only that, but he's also alleging that NSA developed AES.

Read in a literal sense, that is true, but the NSA has sufficient influence to exercise an effective veto over mass-market crypto just by saying they don't believe it's secure (whether that is true or not). If the NSA said "don't use AES", most people wouldn't use AES. They also could have easily spooked everyone off Rijndael during the AES selection process.

For that reason, I don't generally find it useful to argue the point of exactly where Rijndael actually came from.

Well it highly unlikely that they were not involved in the selection process for AES, so in a sense they did develop AES.

Also with Suite B, the NSA tells you want eliptic curve parameters to use. They may have chosen those parameters to suit there needs, should be need to break the encryption.

I think it's _hugely_ unlikely that the NSA has a way to break something like AES-256. Advances in crypto of that magnitude don't come out of nowhere, and there's not even a hint of how you would do that on the radar.

That being said... A focused attack by the US Government is a treat model that you just can't protect against (and still use any sort of modern technology). You can use all the encryption you want... They're gonna drop rootkits on your devices, bug your house and car, compromise your associates, etc... The fact that there have been some cases where encryption prevented an 'easy' wiretap, it doesn't mean they weren't able to get the information through some other means.

Hummm... no

Even breakable it's still a pain

And "break encryption" is a too broad term. What encryption? Which cases?

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