DailyDirt: Cracking Codes The Old Fashioned Way

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Wed, Jan 15th 2014 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Government code-cracking projects are usually depicted in movies as super-secret endeavors where brilliant minds create amazing algorithms that are decades ahead of anything else out there. The truth is probably closer to a room full of monkeys typing away randomly, occasionally getting bits of Shakespeare, combined with some average IT folks just collecting as much data as they can from the software backdoors that have been put in place in the most commonly-used applications. (So much for Area 51 conspiracy theorists and their ilk.) Brute force methods might be the best we can do, and here are just a few links related to breaking some encryption schemes.

The NSA has been openly working on developing a quantum computer that could crack codes much faster than conventional high performance computing efforts. Experts predict true quantum computing is anywhere from 3 to 25 years away... and it's probably further away since state-of-the-art spying techniques seem to use backdoors and wrenches rather than any super-sophisticated algorithms. [url]
Quantum computing isn't quite magic. It still has physical limits, such as requirements for ultra-precise time keeping and complex maintenance of the quantum states of sizable arrays of atoms/molecules/particles. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. [url]
Some mathematicians once thought that the NSA could secretly have a way to factor large numbers in polynomial time. Academic mathematicians are probably not lagging their peers in classified government research, but there might still be some secret algorithms known only to the NSA that are better than concepts like Karmarkar's algorithm. [url]

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Filed Under: algorithms, backdoor, encryption, factoring, math, np complete, quantum computing
Companies: nsa, rsa

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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jan 2014 @ 6:30pm

With Snowden?
I would be surprised if they had hidden polynomial factoring. That kind of insight would be very insightful to computer science that only a short-sighted idiot would be keeping it secret to break cryptography they are already working so hard to compromise.
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Peter Wakefield Sault, 16 Jan 2014 @ 3:53am

NSA Lies
The NSA is bluffing in the hope that cryptographers will despair and Al Qaboom (up the road at Langley VA) will cease encrypting it's pizza orders. All that is required to get past the NSA's "quantum computers" is SINGLE KEY ENCRYPTION.
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- John Fenderson (profile), 16 Jan 2014 @ 11:48am
  
  Re: NSA Lies
  That's an overgeneralization. There are a lot of ways to do single key encryption, and most of them are crackable. Even the ones that are theoretically unbreakable have the significant weaknesses of requiring a key to be transmitted through some other mechanism before it can be used, and that you can trust the people who have the keys (all of the people you're talking with) to keep them secure.
  
  Single key encryption is worthless if you want to communicate with people you haven't prearranged a channel with (goodbye, secure e-commerce) or that you can't trust to be sufficiently concerned with security (goodbye, almost everyone else).
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Peter Wakefield Sault, 16 Jan 2014 @ 4:04am

Enigma
I do not believe that the British Government ever cracked the Enigma code. I believe they used Enigma as an excuse to allow the destruction of Coventry by German bombers, needed because the British people were losing interest in Churchill's war for Jewish bankers and Scottish Freemasons.
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