Bitcoin Forum

Any of the many intercepted devices can exploit and steal your Bitcoins through the NSA and people who figure out the backdoors.

I think identity theft is a much more likely prospect for most people. Compared to fiat, cryptocurrencies are incredibly safe if you take the precautions often recommended on this forum (e.g. use a good storage solution like Armory)

the NSA are not that special. so will people stop FUDDing the forums with government conspiracies.

if you want some bitcoin related evidence that NSA are hopeless. look at the DPR news. the NSA had to send DPR's wallet over to the UK's intelligence office to brute force the password. the NSA cant crack encryption, nor do they have the computer power or skill to bruteforce.

Watch this video, then look around see if you can figure out who on the forum is paid to spread disinformation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA

http://www.theonion.com/articles/worldwide-jewish-conspiracy-worried-it-came-down-t,34815/

for this reason its better to use laptops and os's that are older, eg, before 2009, no one really new to make something to catch BTC or mod hardware, I mean they did not even know what BTC was.

I do wonder what some bored or enterprising coder in Microsoft or OSX may decide to slip in there....to silently take some coins

I still use PC-DOS!!...

While I don't spend my time sweating the NSA, I do think it can be foolish to doubt such a powerful organization.  Just because they can't do something specific now, doesn't mean they won't be able to tomorrow.

That is scary,  very scary , i would really feel more comfortable if a new company dedicated to privacy started making nice phones.
I really dont think that will ever happen but i dont trust the eyephones or the samsungs, i need a company that is dedicated to privacy.
I dont think that will like ever happen, and if it does it wont be known to the internet.

I'm sure that the NSA refers to i-foo users as 'zombies' for a reason, and I have no doubt that Android devices are just about as bad.  I think it entirely likely that any data which is on or has passed through any of my Android or Windows systems has been compromised.  I'm not especially worried about having my money stolen unless the various backdoors are discovered and exploited by criminal third parties though I anticipate that that is just a matter of time.

Probably we'll need to start from raw silicon and have open source hardware from start to finish in order to have much confidence in our compute resources going forward.  Also have manufacturing processes audited by trusted entities (perhaps the likes of the EFF.)

I do believe that the market for such developments will exist at some point.  It's a big world, and a lot of us feel that it is entirely appropriate to enjoy a reasonable amount of privacy.  The question in my mind is mostly along the lines of whether such efforts will even be allowed to proceed should the run the danger of being successful in achieving a goal of reasonable privacy.

You got to be kidding us, UK intelligence agency has more computing power to bruteforce a password then the NSA ???

True.  Is there a source to this claim?

So basically because the NSA can't break encryption they designed to be unbreakable they should be laughed at? I guess we shouldn't worry about mass surveillance, and the exploitation of our brothers and sisters?(paid for with our tax dollars of course) 

Drones? Lol nah, NSA can't break pgp encryption and sha-256 breh


www.theonion.com

Oh dear.  Logic failure.  It long been argued that "they" wouldn't engineer back doors for the very good reason that if they were discovered lots of very important government/commercial information would be compromised.  A leak could blow open all security.  Now lets look to a leak, Snowden, and its evident that NSA etc have focused on interception.  Why would you try interception if you've got back doors in everything?  You would not, so in effect Snowden's revelations have shown that NSA have not got back doors written into systems.


Though i've no doubt to us Brit's fine IT skills, its passed to UK so its nice and legal.  We do the same the other way.

You forgot to write "ATTACH KEYWORDS: NSA, exploit, bitcoin, chart, proof, evidence" on the end of this. How can we possibly believe you if you don't instruct us to imagine that you've supplied proof and evidence?


Also, have you had a chat with the forum member called "Actor_Tom_Truong"? I think you'd get on really well. Once you'd each figured out that the other wasn't a member of the Illuminati, you could tell us all how you did it so we can improve our infiltration of the world's banking and political systems. Shit, did I just type that out loud?  :-[

Smartphone wallets are not safe anyway. I have only BTC 0.002 in my android wallet. No use in having much, as I can't shop using BTCs in my area.

It honestly makes me sad that we have this whole generation of people growing up that find conspiracy sites and take them at face value without even using their brains to question their validity properly, but that's the Internet for you, it's power to spread as much mis-information as real information.

Yes, I'm comfortable with the opinion that the NSA isn't trying to steal people's bitcoins.

I'm more worried about the rogue sysadmin at a mobile carrier that has access to sneak in a few lines of code into an official update, unbeknownst to all until the bitcoins are swiped.  Discussed here:

Can a mobile be protected against the “Linode problem”?
  http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/3383

The NSA can rob any wallet whether its iphone or not. The iphone is just probably easier.

Der Speigel, the Guardian, NYT,  WSJ etc are hardly conspiracy sites. The recent iPhone and WiFi news regarding NSA capabilities was reported there. It makes me sad when facts are ignored or dismissed.

If the capability is there it is naive to think only the NSA will have it for long.

Who said anything about The Guardian newspaper website being a conspiracy site?.  Tell me, does it also make you sad when said supposed facts get twisted beyond all recognition into some alternative 'truth'?
Too many blind extremist views, at either end, not enough thinking and common sense...

No, but they do tend to mis-understand or mis-report the technical details for a non-technical audience.  An awful lot of the Snowden revelations are either not revelations only confirmation of what was widely known/suspected, and a lot of the rest is technically possible only on a small scale, but the newspapers don't outline any of this.  Some perspective is required.

Really? You got a link to this?

It's not completely clear what capabilities exist with which manufacturer's implementations of a TPM chip.

TPM is kind of neat in some ways, and provides some capabilities which really could be useful to more advanced distributed crypto-currency solutions (to my way of thinking) but they are opaque by their nature and by the nature of how design and  manufacture of chips tend to happen these days.  There is a pretty neat vid of someone grinding down one of these chips to have a deeper look inside floating around.  Very few people have the time and skill to do this kind of investigation unfortunately.  Even more unfortunate is that it is necessary.

Laymen, and even people who should know better, have a pretty dim understanding of certain things.  One of them is that it is computer algorithms that do much of the analysis of bulk data collections.  People tend to imagine other people looking through their data.  Of course this is not true (usually) but there is not much difference between my looking at message, or writing a program to look at it.  The big threat is that the data forms a dossier which can be leveraged to attack individuals in the future and thus provides a framework for enduring intimidation.

Another mis-conception which is more pertinent to this conversation is that whatever back-door methods which might exist would almost never be utilized,  Doing so would be dangerous since it is possible (though very tedious and technical) to monitor what happens on one's network.  If there are surreptitious means of leveraging the remote attestation related capabilities of a TPM chip and various other like techniques, it is likely that they would be used only under limited circumstances.  e.g., the target is both very high value and situated in a location where it is unlikely that they have deployed their own packet capture infrastructure or logic analyzers on their hardware or whatever.  I think that one of the many Snowden documents alluded to this issue though there have been so many that I've forgotten.  Anyway, it's obvious enough to someone with an understanding of some of the technology.

 edit: add missing sentence for clarity.

many people will think some stuff is fabricated if you simply give them one link.. so how about googleing "DPR GCHQ" and you will find many articles on the issue and you can do your own research to back up its validity.. that way i cannot be blamed for pointing you in the wrong direction if i have given you the key to all the directions to find the information..

The NSA are powerless, Anonymous hacking group can take them done but I see why not, they havent done shit in a year.

Some script kiddies can hammer the NSA's web site into submission for a few hours.  That's what you mean by 'take them down'?  You go ahead and think what you like about the capabilities of the NSA, but, of course, the most common way to get one's ass kicked is to underestimate one's opponent.  For the sake of design, at least, my assumption is that the NSA has capabilities which would blow away almost everyone reading this note including most of the Bitcoin devs who may happen by.

Android is safe, I have a encryption option that takes 2 hours to encrypt the whole device.

The likelihood that the NSA is interested in stealing anyones bitcoin private keys is smaller than winning the lottery every month. Although that doesn't mean they don't have the means to do it, which I believe is the title of this thread if I’m not mistaken. Someone could figure out how to exploit these backdoors...which some have done in the past. Luckily they were presented as opposed to used.

Good thing the majority of security conscious people don't keep their coins on a phone anyway they use Armory, paper wallets, etc.

Oh that is a sorrowful news for all bitcoin holders. But still I have faith in bitcoins and I guess bitcoin will consider to enhance its security level further to assure the protection of bitcoin holders. By the way fraud is everywhere like credit cards or online banking is also full of risk. 

Hahaha, come on, dude. Anonymous are a bunch of basement dwellers who DDOS websites.

Im sorry! lol I dont know anything about source coding, I read a book on compiling with C++ for dummies and got bored lol.