Misconceptions About Forward Secrecy | Hacker News Reader

Misconceptions About Forward Secrecy

blog.thijsalkema.de

50 pointsxnyhps9 comments

It seems that in post-2013 articles on encryption the phrase "a malicious 3rd party" has been completely replaced by the 3-letter acronym: NSA.

To be fair, they're one of a small set (possibly of size 1) of organisations that would be able to carry out most of the attacks discussed. Things that were considered highly unlikely pre-2013 are now a real possibility, if not probability.

why? is there any revelation that they have the compute power to do that? Or it's just because now it's know that they'd really like to do it?

The NSA is somewhat open about the massive amounts of computing power they have available: http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

Lots of goodies on this public site like "This [compute cluster] will give us the capability to break the AES encryption key within an actionable time period and allow us to read and process stored encrypted domestic data as well as foreign diplomatic and military communications."

Obviously leaked documents and other media reports contain much scarier revelations into what the NSA is capable of, but I thought I'd post what they acknowledge since it's safe to assume they're capable of much more.

In case someone doesn't pick up on it, gov1.info is a parody site.

Wow I'm gullible.

This article is dead wrong on multiple points. First off, the impact of multiple keys is different for the parallel Rho method: the time to the first key to be cracked is the same. Secondly ECDH is commonly used to avoid the problem mentioned in the second point. The worst part is people will make decisions based on this wrong information.

My claim is: FS does not imply, by definition, that every attack scales linearly in the amount of keys. Having a counter-example of an attack that does scale linearly does not disprove that point.

I indeed only cover DH at #2, as index-calculus does not apply to ECDH.

Looks like the page is dead?

Edit: oh it's back. In any case here's a better archive if it goes down again https://archive.is/2rQfr

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