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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

It seems like you're calling section 4.1 of the paper "magical"; do you have something specific in it to object to that makes you think the estimates are severely mistaken?

In order to defend against adversaries with undisclosed capabilities, you have to extrapolate known attack methods and hardware to produce estimates of what may be practical. Every paper that proposes keylength and parameter size recommendations does this. If we didn't extrapolate this way, there would have been no reason to stop using 56-bit symmetric ciphers until 1998 (!). The hardware necessary to crack such a cipher could have been dismissed as "magical" because nobody who had built it had published a paper about it.

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It is magical. There is a magic 36000-core (?) computer that has been running for years (?). Well no, the paper just invents it. On the hearsay that an "anonymous nsa official" said they'd cracked something.

It astonishes me that people are running about like rabbits in a headlight on such flimsy nonsense.

But I understand. It makes us feel important. The new James Bond movie is coming out. And imagine! We're like a superhero secret agent. We can protect from the big bad government by increasing all the keys to 2048 bits! And we get to feel special and important.

Sigh.

People who protect other people's communications security are special and important.

From the paper:

With standard transistor costs and utilization, this would cost about $2 per chip to manufacture, after fixed design and tape-out costs of roughly $2M [32]. This suggests that an $8M investment would buy enough ASICs to complete the DH-1024 sieving precomputation in one year.

$8 million is pocket change for the NSA, who's estimated yearly budget is around $10 billion.

Classified documents published by Der Spiegel [46] indicate that NSA is passively decrypting IPsec connections at significant scale. The documents do not describe the crypt- analytic techniques used, but they do provide an overview of the attack system architecture.

Due to the Snowden leaks, we know the NSA is doing something that they haven't been able to do previously. The paper just explains, given what we know today, how this is plausible. There's nothing magical about that.

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