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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

> no need for tinfoil hat theories

Unfortunately with the Snowden disclosures, there isn't much that I rule out of bounds for the NSA when it comes to things critical to internet security. OpenSSL is so widely used and critical, it would be silly to think that it would escape scrutiny by the NSA.

For example of NSA efforts in related areas (which I figured you would already know): http://www.cnbc.com/id/101301261 http://nation.time.com/2013/11/04/google-shocked-the-nsa-hac... http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/31/us-usa-security-ns... https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130909/11430124454/john-...

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There is a difference between infiltrating companies and deliberately introducing a bug that compromises a large chunk of the Internet. I would assume the NSA is interested in gaining access to systems in a way that doesn't allow basically anyone to ride on their coattails.

Perhaps they assume all software is buggy, so they may as well own the bugs?

I would assume the NSA always assumed (note past tense) that their secrets stay pretty secret, and their wide-open backdoors will not get knockers.

They don't assume that.

I don't see why people think that NSA is simultaneously genius-level forces of the Illumanti architecting events that will culminate years later, and yet would make the rookie level mistake of introducing a backdoor that is protected only by obscurity.

They know other security services understand how to decompile code (or read the original source).

More importantly, they know that critical government services they can't predict will end up possibly running things like their broken version of OpenSSL. There's a FIPS standard, of course, but note that the Heartbleed page made quite clear that FIPS is vulnerable too.

> I would assume the NSA is interested in gaining access to systems in a way that doesn't allow basically anyone to ride on their coattails.

Don't we actually already have evidence of other cases of the NSA adding backdoors to widely used systems, exploitable by anyone aware of them? Isn't that what the elliptic curve backdoor was? http://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoor/all/

Apparently your assumption is quite not safe to assume.

I guess the NSA either figures nobody else will notice the backdoor, or just doesn't care. I guess only they know their motivations.

The mooted backdoor in the Dual-ECDRBG involves the possibility that the public parameters were generated based on some secret values, such that knowing the secret values allows you to break the generator.

It doesn't allow just anyone to break it - merely knowing the backdoor is there isn't enough.

> the NSA is interested in gaining access to systems in a way that doesn't allow basically anyone to ride on their coattails.

If possible, yes. However, if they were indeed responsible for this, they'd probably have a couple honeypots to detect exploitation by third parties. If they considered the third party harmless, they could decide whether the vulnerability should be "independently discovered" or not.

Planting a complicated exploit would be harder and increase the risk it could be traced back to them.

On the other hand, if the NSA pwned OpenSSL, shouldn't such a big thing have been in Snowden's docs?

The NSA, according to the Snowden docs, can break SSL. No details though: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/12/how-does-nsa...

Those documents do not say they can break SSL. They say they focus on SSL, and can break some specific SSL-using services.

Would the specific be the version of openssl being used by the 'target'?

Can't look right now but was this 'bug' introduced at some point in time?

This bug was added 2 years ago, the Snowden documents are from before that, as far as I know.

It could be. Only a percentage of the documents have been analysed so far.

Snowdon might not have known every implementation detail.

"the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

Actually, it is (a weak form of bayesian ~).

http://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/informal_logic/ar...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ih/absence_of_evidence_is_evidence_o...

Interesting. However, your sources are rather obscure, and I'm not sure what you mean by "a weak form."

I'd say a Baysian analysis is a way to evaluate the veracity of an argument from ignorance, not necessarily a replacement of that argument. An argument from ignorance is a strict subset of a baysian analysis in which there is no causal relationship between the missing evidence, and the conclusion. This is such a case. So we can conclude by using a baysian analysis that this is in fact an argument of ignorance.

Unless, of course, you have additional statistical samples that show a non zero relationship between not knowing about NSAs activity and the fact that they are engaged in that activity.

In Snowden's TED talk he said that the best reporting is yet to come.

http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_snowden_here_s_how_we_take_b...

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