lavabit encrypted email service forced to shut down

[JBMcB]

Lots of buzz in the news sites today about the G encrypting all traffic.

Also about how the NSA has backdoors into most commercial encryption schemes. IPSec is mentioned specifically, I would imagine SSL and TLS is involved as well.

[Jimaz]

Total duration 28 minutes:

Attachment 21434
Is Edward Snowden a Hero? A Debate With Journalist Chris Hedges & Law Scholar Geoffrey Stone

Edward Snowden's decision to leak a trove of secret documents outlining the NSA's surveillance program has elicited a range of reactions. Among his detractors, he's been called "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison," [[Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker), who's committed "an act of treason," [[Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee). To supporters, Snowden is a hero for showing that "our very humanity [is] being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe," [[author Douglas Rushkoff), one whom President Obama should "thank and offer him a job as a White House technology advisor," [[American Conservative editor Scott McConnell). We host a debate with two guests: Chris Hedges, a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times; and Geoffrey Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Stone served as an informal advisor to President Obama in 2008, years after hiring him to teach constitutional law.

• Democracy NOW!

[Jimaz]

From the February 17th edition of Time magazine: The Quantum Quest for a Revolutionary Computer:

...One of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, published last month, revealed that the NSA has an $80 million quantum-computing project suggestively code-named Penetrating Hard Targets. Here's why: much of the encryption used online is based on the fact that it can take conventional computers years to find the factors of a number that is the product of two large primes. A quantum computer could do it so fast that it would render a lot of encrytion obsolete overnight. You could see why the NSA would take an interest....

BUT WE'RE NOT THERE YET. ADIABATIC QUANTUM COM-puting may be technically simpler than the gate-model kind, but it comes with trade-offs....

For example, you can't as yet perform the kind of cryptographic wizardry the NSA was interested in, because an adiabatic quantum computer won't run the right algorithm. It's a special-purpose tool....

So is Time trying to create a false sense of security within the NSA's targets? Or not? Time will tell.

[Jimaz]

Sorry for dredging up a fossil thread but this loose end has been bugging me for what? SIX YEARS?! This post should evict it from my head.

I'm not sure if they still teach this in school. We learned it when we learned to use slide rules. With slide rules you have to keep track of the decimal point yourself so the following idea helps with that.

There's a relationship between a number and the number of decimal digits with which it is written [[ignoring leading zeroes, of course). The number of digits is equal [[with trivial correction) to the base-ten logarithm, or common log, of the number itself. The easiest way to demonstrate this is with powers of ten:

10^0 = 1 so log[[1) = 0
10^1 = 10 so log[[10) = 1
10^2 = 100 so log[[100) = 2
10^3 = 1000 so log[[1000) = 3
etc.

Note that the logarithm always equals the number of zeroes following the 1.

You can multiply numbers by adding their logarithms then taking the antilog of that sum. The size of the product is equal to the sum of the sizes of its factors.

So, for a human-scale example, a 12-digit composite could be a product of two 6-digit primes, three 4-digit primes or four 3-digit primes. In a computerized brute force attack attempting to factor the 12-digit composite, searching through all 6-digit primes for the correct factors is far more time consuming than searching all 3-digit primes. It's the size of the primes that make the problem difficult, and hence the crypto secure, not the number of primes.

Machine-scale encryption can use arbitrarily large numbers to achieve any degree of security desired.