Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

One significant point that this analysis misses is that even when traffic is encrypted, it can be recorded and later decrypted by the ISP or those they give/sell/leak the recordings to if the encryption is ever compromised (which seems to happen on a pretty regular basis with SSL these days).

Never let yourself get lulled in to a false sense of security just because the information you wish to keep private has been encrypted.

View on HN

TLS connections that implement forward secrecy are not vulnerable to this type of attack. According to SSL Labs, about half of all sites now support forward secrecy.

https://www.trustworthyinternet.org/ssl-pulse/

It's possible to decrypt the exact URL you're browsing for a large majority of websites with very high probability, even with forward secrecy. There is an undergraduate project that does this for wikipedia pages (it's easy because of all the unique resources loaded for each page). Search for papers on https traffic analysis, for example:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.0297

This may be true for now, but if/when scalable quantum computing arrives, the recorded key exchange can be used to recover the session key (much easier than attacking AES itself). If you need confidentiality in the face of quantum adversaries, you'll need post quantum crypto but this is still a fairly young area of research.

Only if it's implemented correctly.

This is not necessarily true if the cipher used provides forward secrecy, is it?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy:

>As of March 2016, 49.4% of TLS-enabled websites are configured to use cipher suites that provide forward secrecy to modern web browsers.

Until recently it was technically or financially unfeasible for an ISP to record all traffic and keep it forever. Maybe today it isn't (or maybe it still is -- I have some experience using large, petabyte-scale, reliable data archives and they are from what I've seen still expensive and slow), but does anyone have knowledge if it actually happening? If it is, how is it being financed? Why would a competitor not undercut with better performance/cheaper pricing by not building such a logging infrastructure?

Had to create additional account , but for sure some countries do and understand lot of american companies data if not in rest outside but in transit... There are companies that avoid these but hmm....

Serious question, that's not generally how SSL vulnerabilities work is it?

No, it's usually flaws in implementation that are discovered, thus perhaps allowing to recover the key (for example, see the news about openssl for the past few years,) or maybe recover the information in transit.

Whereas if you have a record of encrypted traffic, you have to find a flaw in the encryption algorithm itself, or wait until someone else does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com