Hacker News Reader

Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

  Client-to-server encryption with central message routing [..]

will be abused by the NSA and anyone else that can get their hands on access. And no amount of politicking is going to change that, as it hasn't changed anything about their blatant disregard of the law thus far. BTW, 'anyone else that can get their hands on access' will include foreign nations and criminals.

  [..] can easily be given a backdoor [..]

that magically does manage to stay out of the hands of foreign nations and criminals, where all other backdoors thus far have been discovered and abused?

These arguments have a huge track record against them and I downvoted you for either acting wilfully ignorant.

View on HN

How many of the NSA's backdoors have ended up in the hands of foreign nations and criminals, again?

To be fair, the NSA did have a very high profile incided where they were considering legally mandating a physical backdoor, called the Clipper Chip, until it was proven that the chip had a gaping vulnerability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

That's kind of proving my point, isn't it? They reacted to the vulnerability (decades ago) by not deploying it, and presumably learning some lessons.

All of them.

That's entirely unprovable, given that we have no idea how many backdoors the NSA has, nor for the matter, are we even sure how many have been leaked.

Of course it is, but note that my comment did not make any statement about NSA backdoors and anyone mentioning those is just trying to muddy my argument by acting as if it did.

Yeah, implied subject is a thing, implied predicate less so in common parlance.

At least one major one, it appears-- in the form of substituting the backdoor parameters with attacker selected ones.

http://dualec.org/DualECJuniper-draft.pdf

Clipper chip is the classic example...

So far, as far as we know, 100% of them. We'll need more data for an accurate picture.

> How many of the NSA's backdoors have ended up in the hands of foreign nations and criminals, again?

Good timing, the day after your message-- there were dozens of them posted to the public with a suggestion more may go to the highest bidder.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/power...

“Without a doubt, they’re the keys to the kingdom,” said one former TAO employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal operations. “The stuff you’re talking about would undermine the security of a lot of major government and corporate networks both here and abroad.” Said a second former TAO hacker who saw the file: “From what I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that it was legitimate.”

If the other example I gave wrt dual_ec drbg wasn't enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com