On Jun 2, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Charles Wyble wrote:
David Barak wrote:
Paranoia 101 teaches us that any given encryption approach will
eventually fall before a brute-force onslaught of sufficient power
and duration[1].
Of course. Hence my comment bout the likely hood of success
depending on how much computing power they have access to. How much
easier does my job get if I have access to thousands of encrypted e-
mails vs 1 encrypted e-mail? Once I factor your PKI root private
key, your toast.
Note that most PKI (such as RSA) may be breakable when and if Quantum
computers
become practical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm
Storing large amounts of PKI encrypted data for that day I am sure
would interest some organizations.
Regards
Marshall
It was my impression that the various algorithms were designed to
prevent traffic analysis attacks, or at least vastly reduce there
effectiveness, and if some magical corner case is discovered it
should be further mitigated by key rotation right? I'm an operations
guy, not a math wizard. :)
I'm not trying to argue that the attacker in this case could
necessarily detect a flaw in the algorithm; rather, they'll get an
effectively infinite number of chances to bang against it with no
consequences. Once it's cracked, the attacker will *still* have the
physical access which is thus compromised, and then has free access
to all of the transmissions.
Sure. However couldn't they do this in a lab environment? Various
botnets give them access to massive amounts of computing power on an
ongoing basis. I presume that the folks with sufficient expertise
and knowledge to do these attacks use exploits / back doors that
ensure continued access to this computing power, which won't be
detected/patched by the little tykes doing spamming/phising/data
correlation.
Then there is the ability to buy a whole lot of specialized number
crunching compute gear as well.
Granted the US govt has there own (classified) encryption algorithms
and as such that can't be replicated in a lab environment and
requires access to the physical medium carrying traffic encrypted by
said algorithms.
Physical security is a prerequisite to all of the other approaches
to communication security. Those cases where physical security is
presumed to be non-existant have to rely on a lot of out-of-band
knowledge for any given method to be resistant to attack, and it's
very hard to make use of a connection of that type for regular
operations.
Really? The US Military uses a whole lot of wireless (satellite,
ground baed, surface to air) links. Those links can be sniffed (by
people with sufficient motivation/funding/gear to do so). They rely
on encryption to protect them.