About encryption as a privacy protection from the NSA

[1-Old-Man]

I worked for them 45years ago. Even back then they broke electronic encryption in dam near real time. Knowing at least something of their capability half a century ago I find all this talk what they can't do dam near laughable. If someone were to tell me that now days they can read minds I would not doubt it for a second.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. The NSA abruptly stopped fighting the deployment of public key encryption

A long time ago.

[wandy]

2. Encryption is meant to be broken..........

I remember when DES 64 was considered unbreakable.

DES is now considered to be insecure for many applications. This is chiefly due to the 56-bit key size being too small; in January, 1999, distributed.net and the Electronic Frontier Foundation collaborated to publicly break a DES key in 22 hours and 15 minutes

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

So much for that.
As to later versions of DES.
An interesting read.
http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/vpns/day-des-died_722

Are their other forms of Encryption?
Yes.
Can they be cracked?

[bobduca]

3. 256 AES is effectively secure against brute force, & when its cracked, we move to 512, 1024 etc.

256 bits is a whole lot more key space than 56 bits.... thus the longer time to find the needle in the much larger haystack.

All hacks /hackers know this so they exploit humans and human processes to gain physical access to computer hard drives
where the private keys are located.

http://www.eetimes.com/design/embedded-internet-design/4372428/How-secure-is-AES-against-brute-force-attacks-

[wandy]

5. Yes and each key is sepreat. That makes it hard................

Still, their is the matter of how much comput power you want to throw at it.
I suspect the NSA can bring something a bit more sever than an AMD 8150 to bare.

But you are right. Humans are cheaper!

[cprise]

7. Yes

...and everyone who isn't a goober with a dust-choked desktop computer and an Xbox is in the pocket of the US gubbmit.

Academia and independent science doesn't exist. International rivalry doesn't exist. The US gubbmit is this collection of Supermen who oversee everyone else and the latter are relegated to web browsing and video games.

This attitude comes straight from the swamp that produced the moon landing "hoax" and chemtrail theories. Its what happens when people watch too much Hollywood garbage instead of taking an interest in math and science.

[longship]

4. The argument from personal credulity.

Public key cryptology is based on particular problems in number theory, discrete mathematics, the mathematics of whole numbers.

Certain problems in number theory can be constructed such as they can be easily solved only in one direction and extremely difficult to do so in reverse. In the vernacular of cryptology, they're called trap door algorithms. Once you fall through, it's very difficult to get back up.

Now, here's the deal with the insecurity of the 64-bit key DES crypto. It is insecure, that's true. But the context of this test that showed its security was the government attempts to make it a standard. It was broken to show that.

But here's the other deal with these algorithms. They are based on problems whose solution can only approached by exhaustive search. If the search space isn't large enough one can make them secure enough simply by making the search space larger. A 64 bit search space is too small? Fine! Make it a 128 bit search space, which is not double the size, but 65,536 times larger. And a 256 bit one is hugely more greater.

For any level of technology, one can construct crypto based on simple number theory which will make a trap door complex enough that it would take centuries to solve by existent tech.

There are no back doors. And the software is available for free, off the shelf... And in source code so one can be sure of its security.

Knowing the algorithm doesn't help solve the inverse function because there is no analytical solution to the inverse function other than an exhaustive search. And by selecting a long enough key size, one can make that arbitrarily beyond reach.

Too bad, NSA.

Math rules!

[cprise]

6. There was a revolution in crypto

You seem to have missed it.

Ways around crypto exist, esp. if the user is sloppy. But the best examples of today's crypto themselves remain very secure.