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Comment by PlzSnow | Hacker News Reader

"FWIU of the situation, we have reason to suspect the government has 'cracked' the default large primes that are commonly used by a bunch of different software packages, including web servers."

This is just nonsense. Am I the only sane one here? Can no-one else see that the response is hysterical? There's no evidence whatsover that any of this has happened. It's conspiracy conjecture.

Look, I know the cultural narrative on HN is that the NSA is the all-seeing-eye, but can't we have a sensible discussion about this? Because it's embarrassing for me to be active on a website that reverts to the mean conspiracy theory of the world.

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> nonsense ... the only sane one here ... hysterical ... conspiracy conjecture ... the cultural narrative ... all-seeing eye ... sensible ... conspiracy

Nearly this entire comment is name-calling in the sense of the HN guidelines when they say: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

When posting to HN, please edit that out and stick to the substance.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand... Based on the evidence we have, we can’t prove for certain that NSA is doing this. However, our proposed Diffie-Hellman break fits the known technical details about their large-scale decryption capabilities better than any competing explanation. For instance, the Snowden documents show that NSA’s VPN decryption infrastructure involves intercepting encrypted connections and passing certain data to supercomputers, which return the key. The design of the system goes to great lengths to collect particular data that would be necessary for an attack on Diffie-Hellman but not for alternative explanations, like a break in AES or other symmetric crypto. While the documents make it clear that NSA uses other attack techniques, like software and hardware “implants,” to break crypto on specific targets, these don’t explain the ability to passively eavesdrop on VPN traffic at a large scale."

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-...

Ok, how's this for sensible? The holy trinity of criminal law is means, motive and opportunity. Let's review:

Does the NSA have the means for such an attack? The article argues convincingly that they do.

Does the NSA have the motive for such an attack? Yes, if their mission is to gain access to as much of the signals traffic in the world as possible -- and I think that's been pretty well shown to be true.

Does the NSA have the opportunity for such an attack? Certainly, the Snowden papers have shown that the NSA has access to a wide variety of communications channels.

So, I think it's a perfectly sane argument to say that if the NSA haven't performed this attack already, they will certainly do so at some point in time against some target. And, if they are not, state intelligence organizations under other flags, such as China, will -- and China has shown a clear interest in attacking not just military but also commercial targets within the USA.

You want a sensible discussion? How about starting with not calling people "conspiracy theorists" for merely wanting to be as safe as possible?

And how about not asking things such as "Am I the only sane one here?" then? You're surrounded with very smart people on this website, most of which will tell you that it's not insane to assume the worst of the NSA, and yet you hop around calling people crazy. If you're not going to do this for the sake of reason, at least do it for the sake of humility.

You want a sensible discussion, you start.

> Am I the only sane one here? Can no-one else see that the response is hysterical?

This is an asinine pair of questions to ask because they are logically unanswerable and interdependently blaming. If someone were to answer "yes, you are the only sane person here", then you've successfully elevated yourself to a level by which you can judge. If someone were to answer "no, you aren't the only sane person here" you get the sequential treatment applied to the rhetorical question "So you can see this response is (then) hysterical?" and you still get to judge.

Clearly you think I'm hysterical, regardless of whether it was asked as a question or not.

I have every right to voice my opinions and questions about how we can trust the tools we use for our craft on a day-to-day basis. I also have the right to the expectation the tools aren't being mass-monitored by our government as a cheap and insecure way of doing their job: law enforcement. I am grateful to be fortunate enough to understand how we technically implement these levels of trust in our tools and feel it is part of my social responsibility to share my views on these matters with my peers. I don't believe in allowing criminals to break laws, but I also feel that making things less secure by trying to monitor everyone for criminal activity is not the answer because I also think it's prohibitively expensive to eliminate all criminal activity. Maybe that makes me hysterical...but at least I don't speak for others.

I made ZERO blaming statements in my comment. I asserted that, from what I understand of the parent article, we have reason to suspect the government has cracked, or has the ability to crack, large primes. We know for a fact that a lot of software uses the default primes, so the logic goes that the government has the ability to monitor a portion of what we would normally consider secure SSL traffic. That individuals have little way of mitigating this "venerability" is an important one here because it may depend on us working together to determine the attack coverage and exposure. Without knowing those things, we're really at a loss to what could possibly going on with monitoring.

I will also point out that, if those cracked prime solutions exist, they will eventually fall into the wrong hands.

Cryptography based on limitations of computing power has to make the assumption that if the computing power required is even potentially within reach of any existing organization, or within orders of magnitude of being within reach, it's long past time to migrate away. It doesn't matter if the capability has in fact been developed; if it seems even remotely feasible, time to migrate to better crypto.

Moving to 2048 or 4096, or to ECC, thus seems like a prudent step whether you believe such intercept capabilities actually exist or not.

Why is it not a reasonable assumption that the NSA (and possibly other actors with the means) are doing so? / Why wouldn't you do it in their position?

Because this particular military spy organisation is being deployed by the US government against its own citizens, en masse, as an end-around well-established due process and constitutional protections that require individualised suspicion of wrongdoing. It also represents a giant exfiltration target for other state actors, like those who breached OPM. NSA hurts the security of Americans under the guise of preventing foreign terrorism, which happens to pose a risk comparable to lightning strikes.

"Because this particular military spy organisation is being deployed by the US government against its own citizens, en masse"

But it's not. That's the problem. There's no evidence whatsoever of it doing that.

So you're telling me there's no evidence that the NSA has committed call logs of every US Verizon subscriber to their own persistent storage for later inspection? No evidence that NSA intercepted inter-datacenter transfers of American companies, who were housing the personal data of Americans? No evidence that Americans have been swept up in overly-broad "one foreign end" wiretaps? All of the weakdh.org people are crazy? That well-documented room in the AT&T building in San Francisco was just a big misunderstanding?

I would not do it if I was in their position. I'm a US citizen, so I believe in upholding the constitution, which includes a prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. Whatever the lawyers and judges have made "unreasonable" out to be, NSA dragnet surveillance is way beyond "reasonable" and on into "police state" territory.

Also, I'm not a pervert who gets kicks from listening to others' conversations. They apparently are.

The only reasonable assumption I can come up with for not cracking the stock primes would be expense and inability to execute on a plan. Otherwise, it makes perfect sense to crack them. And, talk about fun and interesting work!

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