BBS/nsa surv

BBS/nsa surv

File Name:	nsa_surv.txt
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Key Words:	Politics

From: c3q@vax5.cit.cornell.edu Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk Subject: the NSA KNOWS... Date: 6 Dec 91 15:54:13 GMT Organization: Cornell University

I've been doing some research on data encryption lately, and was led inevitably to the Data Encryption Standard (DES). As originally proposed in the '70's (I think) the DES had a 128 bit key, and 8 code boxes. The NSA did IBM (the originators of the algorithm) a favor by rewriting the code boxes to make them "better" (slight cynicism on my part) and then said "might as well reduce the key to 64 bits, now that the boxes are so strong". Researchers at Stanford have noted mysterious patterns within the code boxes that might be a mathematical back-door into breaking the code. In the DES standard there is also the proviso that highly classified military, etc. data may/should be classified in some other way.

Point 2: In a study of the NSA it was revealed that the NSA owns land next to every major microwave relay route and down-link inside the US. With the scattering inherent in micro-links, this gives them access to 90+% of all data traffic.

Point 3: The NSA measures its computing power in acres (no joke). They are the leading purchaser of latest generation Crays.

Conclusion: The NSA can and does read our mail, encrypted or not.

Caveat: There is so much data flow, that even with filters that pull out only those messages encluding certain key words, any human operators would still be incapable of reading any realistic proportion of our mail. Just hope that expert systems designed for mail reading aren't developed soon (or haven't been developed).

Books to read:

• The Digital Encryption Standard
• Cipher Systems
• Inside the Puzzle Palace

Just thought I'd bring home some of the cyberpunk aspects of the world we currently live in.

Travis J.I. Corcoran Cornell '92/'92 (??) Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk From: ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu (Eli Brandt) Subject: Re: the NSA KNOWS... Organization: Cult of Loud Loud Sibelius Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1991 08:41:46 GMT

In article <164CCD625.M14661@mwvm.mitre.org> M14661@mwvm.mitre.org writes:

>Good points, but does anyone know how the RSA public key algorithm is >holding up? It's slow, but fine for precoding email messages, at least

It seems to be secure as long as you pick big enough primes -- remembering that the NSA has CPU we can only dream of. I strongly suspect that the NSA can crack DES. If they can break RSA with considered-secure primes, it almost certainly takes them much compute, and they would not be expending this kind of effort on *our* messages. I believe PGP, a PC RSA implementation, is still available from garbo.uwasa.fi; US users are kindly requested to refrain from downloading except for research purposes. It uses math owned by PKP, you see.

Eli ebrandt@jarthur.claremont.edu