Something that was always fishy...

Something that was always fishy...

Posted Aug 18, 2004 18:34 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Something that was always fishy... by gproux
Parent article: Crypto researchers abuzz over flaws (News.com)

The spooks are ahead in some areas (for example, public-key crypto was first discovered by the British equivalent of the NSA, and only later rediscovered by Diffie and Hellman), but they aren't gods.

In any case, you shouldn't think that the NSA's chief method is to apply advanced techniques no one else has to effortlessly break crypto systems. They may well do some of that, but they mainly "cheat", exploiting engineering flaws, back doors, hacking/cracking, social engineering, or the like to get access to the messages they want to read. If the NSA wants to read your encrypted traffic, they aren't going to bother breaking the algorithm. They can just 0wn your machine and retrieve the plaintext, as you type it or with a screen-reader; it's a lot easier.

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