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0 pointsx1798DE11y ago0 comments

Is there any evidence anywhere that the NSA is even 2 years ahead of anything? From what I've seen, the NSA doesn't have especially advanced technology, they just have a huge budget and they can exploit trust relationships that normal attackers can't (forcing companies to comply in their schemes, tapping backbone routes on the internet).

Frankly, that's also the most plausible situation independent of what we've learned anyway - it would be fantastically hard to advance technology by ten years entirely in secret. They wouldn't have the benefit of any of the literature released in those 10 years. All their computers and other equipment would be 10 years older, and the sheer number of cryptographers working on these sorts of things at the NSA is almost certainly much smaller than the number working on them outside of these contexts. It would be pretty difficult to pull off, particularly since they can get away with just cheating.

0 pointsx1798DE11y ago0 comments

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4 comments · 3 top-level

NotAtWork11y ago· 1 in thread

The S-boxes were hardened against differential cryptanalysis long before it was publicly disclosed as a method (about a decade), largely because they got the team at IBM work on DES to keep the secret.

So it's entirely within reason to think the NSA has the potential to be a decade ahead of the public on matters of cryptography.

AlyssaRowan11y ago

No, not really. I've been trying to Learn From Them™ [I'm a reverser...] and well, actually it turned out rather fruitless overall.

They eat their own dogfood, too, and move glacially slow: conservativism and military procurement, yay. (One of the Suite A's is basically LUCIFER without the training wheels, a bigger block, and more parity.)

They really aren't as far ahead as you think. What they do have is an absolutely colossal budget, and that helps a lot, especially when they get to cheat, bribe, etc, and try to convince people to use crap stuff that even I could probably break, or stuff on the verge of that (like RC4).

Someone11y ago

Money doesn't buy you faster hardware, but it can buy you more hardware. A lot more money can buy you a lot more hardware, and that can make a difference. They may have been doing stuff on a million machines that 'normal' researchers were only dreaming of, not because they didn't know how to do it, but because they did not have access to a million machines.

It is similar to what gives Google an advantage. Even if you can write a web crawler that is faster than Google's, it is unlikely that you will be able to crawl the web faster than Google does. That also means your statistical translator likely is worse, your homonym disambiguaties is worse, etc.

spacefight11y ago

+1 for the cheating argument! I do think though, that the sheer size of the mathematicians at the NSA can make up for a lot not-released papers within the last 10 years.

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