Money. The better the encryption the more it costs to crack. With forward security you can even protect against your private key leaking. In short, you can raise the stakes and make it economically unfeasible for even the NSA. John John Souvestre - New Orleans LA - (504) 454-0899 -----Original Message----- From: Mike Lyon [mailto:mike.lyon@gmail.com] Sent: Fri, November 01, 2013 9:19 pm To: Harry Hoffman Cc: Niels Bakker; nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: latest Snowden docs show NSA intercepts all Google and Yahoo DC-to-DC traffic So even if Goog or Yahoo encrypt their data between DCs, what stops the NSA from decrypting that data? Or would it be done simply to make their lives a bit more of a PiTA to get the data they want? -Mike
On Nov 1, 2013, at 19:08, Harry Hoffman <hhoffman@ip-solutions.net> wrote:
That's with a recommendation of using RC4. Head on over to the Wikipedia page for SSL/TLS and then decide if you want rc4 to be your preference when trying to defend against a adversary with the resources of a nation-state.
Cheers, Harry
Niels Bakker <niels=nanog@bakker.net> wrote:
* mikal@stillhq.com (Michael Still) [Fri 01 Nov 2013, 05:27 CET]:
Its about the CPU cost of the crypto. I was once told the number of CPUs required to do SSL on web search (which I have now forgotten) and it was a bigger number than you'd expect -- certainly hundreds.
False: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.html
"On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that."
-- Niels.