On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 10:40 PM, joel jaeggli <joelja@bogus.com> wrote:
On Nov 1, 2013, at 7:06 PM, Harry Hoffman <hhoffman@ip-solutions.net> wrote:
That's with a recommendation of using RC4. it’s also with 1024 bit keys in the key exchange.
Better leverage quantum encryption tech to exchange those symmetric keys securely; I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA has DH, DSA, and RSA key exchange schemes defeated or backdoored. RC4 while not a particularly strong cipher may be strong enough cryptography to dissaude the NSA, until the matter comes up to budgeting, and they get a few hundred billion extra in taxpayer money allocated in order to get their truckload of ASICs live for rapidly brute-forcing RC4 keys, or AES keys, or $cipher_of_the_day_keys. With near certainty, there would be more invasive methods of attack available that do not require beating the actual cipher algorithm, and they would exploit any available options --- figure out which devices are responsible for doing the encryption, and compromise the security of those instead. oh RC4 may be strong enough otherwise, but the cryptosystem or library that actually implements the AES RC4 or whatever key/cipher scheme, weak. It's also entirely possible, the implementation you get of RC4, AES, RSA, etc... will contain subtle backdoors in the library, that reduce the cipher strength to a level far less. -- -JH