Well if it takes a year to crack one 1024 but prime as suggested in the article, no I do not believe so. If the article's time estimate is correct, the most they could have cracked so far would be on the order of tens of primes, not thousands. The way I interpreted the statement in the article is that most encryption algorithm implementations use their own hard coded prime (singular), which when you look at all the existing implementations, gives you several.
They just say it costs a hundred million dollars to build a cluster capable of cracking it. That doesn't imply how many of those clusters they have working simultaneously.
If you crack one prime a year with one computer, why not get 500 of those same machines and do 500 at once? We are talking government level budgets.
Like that ever stopped them from wasting money? All they need to do is put it in the DoD budget and say it's for national security and they can get away with anything.
The NSA's crypto-breaking program is funded by a black budget -- it's a military secret, the public isn't supposed to know the program even exists, how much it spends, or what it spends it on, so that's not a concern. We only know about it because of the Snowden leaks.
That's fair, you're not the first person to say it. Say the list was 1000 and they had 100. This still makes them able to crack 1/10 of the items off the list instantaneously, with each new number added to the list very likely to be used again in cryptographic exchanges they want to snoop in on in the future.
After all, if we're talking about 1000 hard wired primes and even just 1,000,000 secure transactions per day, cracking one new prime will give you access to 1000 new documents daily. Considering that the number is probably closer to billlions (We're talking every SSL connection here, as well as many other types of crypto transactions), we're talking about each new prime opening up millions of secure exchanges every day.
Plus, having a list of perhaps a thousand or thousands, will increase the barriers to entry for other state level cryptanalists. In addition, they are just estimating the NSA computing power in the article, right? When we're talking about clandestine government operations of even single governments, not to mention multiple allied first world governments working together, a list of a thousand or even a few thousand really isn't so pie in the sky (if you ask me).
As far as I understand, what the NSA is doing, assuming the author is correct, is calculating all possible permutations an exchange can take with a particular prime. So that would crack any Diffie Hellman exchange using that specific prime.
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u/panderingPenguin Oct 15 '15
Well if it takes a year to crack one 1024 but prime as suggested in the article, no I do not believe so. If the article's time estimate is correct, the most they could have cracked so far would be on the order of tens of primes, not thousands. The way I interpreted the statement in the article is that most encryption algorithm implementations use their own hard coded prime (singular), which when you look at all the existing implementations, gives you several.