Encryption and Security Agencies - Computerphile

News stories surface every day about how National Security Agencies have broken encryption, but what is media 'hype' and what's the truth? - Richard Mortier explains.

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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[deeliciousplum]

These Computerfile vids are highly addictive :-) Thanks for producing these.

[EtzEchad]

True. There are always trade offs. The NSA can still use traffic analysis on you also. (And, of course, there are always thumb-screws if they really want to get the information from you.)

[TechyBen]

Brilliant! love it! :D
Well, I was always told, "It's impossible to prevent someone stealing something, you can just make is economically too much trouble or take too much time" anyhow.

[sjwimmel]

It would be really interesting to know how TOR works. Especially as the FBI recently managed to kill one of the biggest sites using it, Silk Road.

[totoritko]

Yes, this is called a brute-force attack and all practical encryption algorithms make the problem space so large that it is impractical to search it in a brute-force fashion. The breakthrough of quantum computers and quantum cryptanalytic algorithms is is that they (simplifying here) explore pretty much every possible state of the system in parallel rather than in sequence.

[heyandy]

Nice one. Would love more on what we think NSA is capable of. Additionally, it would probably be beneficial to touch on the "surveillance" that social media and other private companies do. Usually we think of this as "analytics" or "experience tracking, " but it is (I think) a more salient threat than nsa (not to mention I can't really do shit about nsa, though I can choose which social media I use).

[DeJayHank]

This actually plinged like a message on my cellphone through the YouTube app. "Computerphile has uploaded a new video"

[DaTux]

No, I think it's better than that. Chaos is not the same as pseudo-randomness. What they did was add very loud chaos to a small real signal (they used an audio message as the signal). This chaos could be reproduced by a receiver if it were driven by the transmitter, in some clever way I won't to go into here. The receiver could then subtract the loud chaos from the composite signal and get a fairly clean real signal out of it (there was a tiny amount of distortion).

[Starchface]

The article (pause playback to see the URL) states that

The New York Times alleges that the NSA may have intentionally introduced a flaw into the algorithm known as Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generation, and then [got] it adopted as a security standard by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Cryptographers suggest avoiding elliptic-key algorithms for now. Fortunately there are good established alternatives.

[DFXKX]

That would be something I'd be curious about, they have an example of RSA on Numberphile, but there are other (much stronger) systems out there.

[IstasPumaNevada]

(Hopefully) constructive feedback; I understand a static face-centered shot would get boring so off-center and movement helps with that, but when his face was being cut off by the edge of the screen I found it distracting enough to pull my mind away from the line of thought.

Useful topic (and interesting as always), thanks for covering it!

[TrimutiusToo]

This reminds me that I spent lots of time on learning how to make openssl exclude all the vulnerable ciphers... not to mention I actually had to find out which of the ciphers are not vulnerable yet...

[nex]

A feature that lets you find/use YOUR OWN computer over the internet is not a backdoor. Also, you can simply leave it turned off if you're afraid someone else could get in. It's possible that some operating system has an NSA backdoor, but the presence of an anti-theft feature is absolutely no proof. Just like the presence of an integrated lock on a bicycle isn't proof that anyone has a skeleton key for these locks.

[TheIvorito]

Was a very similar video made with James on Numberphile quite some time ago? Or am I confused?

[TheHeadHunter]

If you need some really really tough security, get Tor. That's pretty much as good as it gets when it comes to internet security.

[DaTux]

For a more technical explanation of the general scientific view on this "quantum computer", also search for "what can the D-wave quantum computer do? stackexchange" on the web.

[Falcrist]

The NSF has a quantum computer (the D-Wave 1), so I doubt VERY much that the NSA doesn't AT LEAST have priority access to that one.
I absolutely expect that they've bought their own.
Granted, the D-Wave isn't the complete fulfillment of Feynman's idea, but it does count as a quantum computer.

[moepet]

Great video but could you next time emphasize more on what kinds of encrypt ions there are and which ones are most likely to have holes for the NSA?

[AlwayzPr]

Steve Gibson talked about this for a long time on security now

[DFXKX]

There's a whole list of things I wouldn't want to NSA looking at. Some of my AutoCAD stuff, I design things for fun. But if I ever wanted to patent on, I've then got to deal with the fact that some of these companies who are being trusted with my information might opt to use it for themselves. This has happened a few times, watch the news.. Then again, I tend not to store that sort of information on a network-accessible system anyway..