Cryptographic "breakthrough" by NSA?

[charleshoskinson]

And no one remembered to mention DES? Shame on you for your limited historical scope.

[charleshoskinson]

How about clipper then? Actually with DES the story is quite telling and pretty much in line with "store for now, crack later" point.

When IBM and NSA negotiated about "backdoor" into DES IBM wanted 64 bit key, NSA wanted 48 bit, in the end they agreed on 56 bit. Reportedly NSA could not break it just yet but fully expected to be able to do so a few years down the road. This is the modus operandi.

That was my point, thank you Vlad.

[Jace]

the NSA released SHA256 according to wikipedia. The NSA never endorses anything that they can't themselves decrypt, ever.

NSA is unable to decrypt SHA256, because there is nothing to decrypt. Simply is no such thing. SHA256 has nothing to do with encryption whatsoever.

You seem to confuse encryption and decryption with hashing (which is just a checksum that works one-way by definition).

I thought I read something about a breakthrough they had where they could emulate the entire range of SHA256 hashes. That was a really long time ago though. I probably misunderstood it though, as it was years ago.

I doubt that very much. You know there are 2²⁵⁶ such hashes? See here:
(click=large)
 
So if "emulate" means even as much as just counting them, then no.

[charleshoskinson]

Jace is correct in his assumption and statement. The NSA uses SHA256 hashes in its suite B protocols http://www.nsa.gov/ia/programs/suiteb_cryptography/ that are used for secure communications for other government agencies. It would be a terrible idea for any government agency to transmit information from a protocol that is known to be broken.

I am not aware of a good hash collision attack for SHA256 nor any work that introduces a significant flaw in the scheme.

[JoelKatz]

The NSA never endorses anything that they can't themselves decrypt, ever.

That is true for algorithms they can put backdoors in (where it's obvious to everyone that it's possible the NSA could have done so because the constants are "magic"). But it is not true for public algorithms (like SHA256, RSA, and so on) where the constants have known derivations. If the NSA can break it, they know that other intelligence agencies can too, and they can't get the public to change algorithms often. US companies have the most valuable intelligence. Such a strategy would be most unwise.

Update: And what oakpacific said below me.

[oakpacific]

Seriously, get a clue, there is no such thing as "breaking" SHA256, other than quick collison finding, which will only affect address hashing(can be updated to something theoretically unbreakable), and most certainly it doesn't affect mining at all.(to quote Gavin, we would have been just fine using MD5).

[charleshoskinson]

Seriously, get a clue, there is no such thing as "breaking" SHA256, other than quick collison finding, which will only affect address hashing(can be updated to something theoretically unbreakable), and most certainly it doesn't affect mining at all.(to quote Gavin, we would have been just fine using MD5).

But what about my rainbow tables.......

[oakpacific]

Seriously, get a clue, there is no such thing as "breaking" SHA256, other than quick collison finding, which will only affect address hashing(can be updated to something theoretically unbreakable), and most certainly it doesn't affect mining at all.(to quote Gavin, we would have been just fine using MD5).

But what about my rainbow tables.......

That's the whole point, it has nothing to do with all the easy collision-finding algorithms you can come up with.

[MysteryMiner]

Cryptographic "breakthrough" by NSA?

Yes, they finally broke the CD-ROM tray of cryptographic computer using brute force attack.

Realistically they could with such datacenter:

1. Collect unencrypted communications from every source available and then run trough "intellignet" search to find communications that require closer attention by human spy piece of shit.

2. Have copy of certificate authority private keys to silently do MITM attacks with their own certificates. This might be that "breakthrough" article is about. Then feed the "encrypted and then decrypted" communications in step 1.

3. Collect and store everything about everyone to later blackmail persons of interest or to know who to send to death camp first. Stalin did that to his closest comrades, why capitalist pigs cannot do the same?

[salfter]

the NSA released SHA256 according to wikipedia. The NSA never endorses anything that they can't themselves decrypt, ever.

SHA-256 is a hashing algorithm, not an encryption algorithm.  The most you can do to compromise a hash is to find a way to create a hash collision, as happened with MD5 a while back.  While it's possible the NSA withheld such a method from release, that they released the algorithm as open source makes backdoors less feasible.

[lukyforvar]

there is no freedom in the country of freedom