Mathematician warns US spies may be weakening next-gen encryption
www.newscientist.com
Quantum computers may soon be able to crack encryption methods in use today, so plans are already under way to replace them with new, secure algorithms. Now it seems the US National Security Agency may be undermining that process

Mathematician warns NSA may be weakening next-gen encryption::Quantum computers may soon be able to crack encryption methods in use today, so plans are already under way to replace them with new, secure algorithms. Now it seems the US National Security Agency may be undermining that process

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    354·
    1 year ago

    And who is surprised by this? This is basically the NSA doing their job, nothing else.

    • Kodemystic@lemmy.kodemystic.devEnglish
      22·
      1 year ago

      We’re not surprised but we do need to mention this, discuss this, people need to be aware. You won’t see much of this in mainstream media except: “And here’s why the end of encryption might be a good thing…”.

    • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      Sort of. They’ve worked in mysterious ways over the years. They fucked with DES back in the day (specifically, the S-Boxes, which are big tables of data used during calculations), but evidence since then suggests that they actually improved it. However, they also seem to be responsible for keeping the key length short, which meant it was inevitable that computers would eventually be fast enough to break it (which it was by the mid to late 90s).

      The NSA has a dual job. They want to break encryption, but they also need to protect US secrets. Since industrial espionage is a thing, that extends to protecting the secrets of private sector companies. So they sometimes want to improve encryption, and sometimes want to put in backdoors. If you call up someone in the NSA, there’s no guarantee the person your talking to will be on your side or not.

      Fortunately, cryptography in the public space has advanced substantially since DES was invented.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        They fucked with DES back in the day

        Yep. I remember. IBM thought they had something new and BIG, and then came the NSA and just substituted some S-Boxes without comment. And boom, the key space got smaller.

        The NSA has a dual job. They want to break encryption, but they also need to protect US secrets.

        For them it is sufficient when they can happily read along.