The Biggest Threat to Bitcoin: The New American NSA Datacenter

[Jon]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

From this article, it's clear the main goal of the newest datacenter in NSA's line is to crack high-level encryption. The hardware that will be in this is unclear. What is clear is that the budget for this monstrosity is over $2 billion; more than enough monetary power to bring Bitcoin to hell and back.

Stay aware.

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[Liberate]

mmmmmmm imagine the Ghash's, but there more likely to use it for cracking pgp and truecrypt

[Phinnaeus Gage]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

From this article, it's clear the main goal of the newest datacenter in NSA's line is to crack high-level encryption. The hardware that will be in this is unclear. What is clear is that the budget for this monstrosity is over $2 billion; more than enough monetary power to bring Bitcoin to hell and back.

Stay aware.

$2 Billion Dollars!!! That's pretty smart of them to share with our enemies exactly where the nerve center is located if this Cyber Cold War we're currently in ever escalates.

From the same source: Google Asks NSA to Help Secure Its Network

~Bruno~

[hazek]

mmmmmmm imagine the Ghash's, but there more likely to use it for cracking pgp and truecrypt

How vulnerable is pgp and truecrypt to brute force attack by so much hashing power?

[Phinnaeus Gage]

mmmmmmm imagine the Ghash's, but there more likely to use it for cracking pgp and truecrypt

How vulnerable is pgp and truecrypt to brute force attack by so much hashing power?

We're in luck! The NSA will never be able to crack passwords provided by blondes.

During a recent password audit, it was found that a blonde was using the following password:

"MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento"
When asked why she had such a long password, she said
she was told that it had to be at least 8 characters
long and include at least one capital.

[Killdozer]

mmmmmmm imagine the Ghash's, but there more likely to use it for cracking pgp and truecrypt

Since they will just have a lot of parrallel processing power, and have not discovered any real vulnerability in those protocols, it seems it will be enough for truecrypt and gpg users to double they maximum key size and be done with it. As I understand it, the difficulty to crack them increases exponentially with longer keys.

[cypherdoc]

mmmmmmm imagine the Ghash's, but there more likely to use it for cracking pgp and truecrypt

How vulnerable is pgp and truecrypt to brute force attack by so much hashing power?

We're in luck! The NSA will never be able to crack passwords provided by blondes.

During a recent password audit, it was found that a blonde was using the following password:

"MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento"
When asked why she had such a long password, she said
she was told that it had to be at least 8 characters
long and include at least one capital.

ROFLMAO!

[cypherdoc]

i'm not an expert by any means in this area but i thought it was interesting the way the article was written.

basically the author says the NSA has the capability to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, wherever it wants, and to whomever it wants with the additional implication that money is no object.

color me skeptical and would appreciate the comments of those whose technical knowledge or connections is up to par to comment on this.

[Liberate]

With traditional bruteforcing cracking would still be unfeasible,
but maybe they have some crazy quantum or side channel stuff we dont know about.

[cypherdoc]

etotheipi seems pretty well versed in quantum computing and he works in a physics lab in Maryland.  you'd think he'd be pretty up to date on this stuff and he isn't worried about that kinda stuff for 10-20 yrs.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

etotheipi seems pretty well versed in quantum computing and he works in a physics lab in Maryland.  you'd think he'd be pretty up to date on this stuff and he isn't worried about that kinda stuff for 10-20 yrs.

Don't tell me that the government and NSA are smart enough to take advantage of that fact by building the infrastructure now to be prepared for quantum code breaking down the road.

~Bruno~

[genjix]

I use 4096 bits for everything, so I'm fine.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

I use 4096 bits for everything, so I'm fine.

But now I'm going with 8192 bits just to be sure.

~Bruno~

[Vladimir]

2 billion$ for cracking a typical password for anything remotely important

W39aJtv<w50>jcvOBJ20f<J36MDU{skK

Should not take more than a few milleanias. Good luck with this.

Rubber hoses and predators and bent senators are so much more cost effective than those datacentres.

[MysteryMiner]

mmmmmmm imagine the Ghash's, but there more likely to use it for cracking pgp and truecrypt

How vulnerable is pgp and truecrypt to brute force attack by so much hashing power?

Imagine a safe made from steel. The walls is thicker than diameter of Milky Way galaxy. That's how strong is properly deployed TrueCrypt. The 2billion diamond saw will not cut trough the steel wall hundreds of light-years thick in reasonable time. With reasonable I mean before Earth takes plunge into Sun.

I guess the new NSA datacenter is not for raw bruteforcing but for mining semantic data from all your intercepted e-mails and other unencrypted junk travelling trough internet backbones.

[evoorhees]

I guess the new NSA datacenter is not for raw bruteforcing but for mining semantic data from all your intercepted e-mails and other unencrypted junk travelling trough internet backbones.

+1!  Probably far easier and more cost effective to simply find the IP's of most bitcoiners, and destroy all their stuff, set them up on rigged cocaine charges, and put them in prison. That'd be a better attack vector.

[rjk]

I guess the new NSA datacenter is not for raw bruteforcing but for mining semantic data from all your intercepted e-mails and other unencrypted junk travelling trough internet backbones.

+1!  Probably far easier and more cost effective to simply find the IP's of most bitcoiners, and destroy all their stuff, set them up on rigged cocaine charges, and put them in prison. That'd be a better attack vector.

According to the article, they are specifically targeting AES encryption, and are hoping to break 128-bit and lesser stuff from 10 years ago to do analysis of the old data to see if there are patterns. They have collected information for a long time, and are only now having a go at actually breaking the encryption. 256-bit should be fine for a while yet, but in 10 more years it may also be breakable, if you have a 2 billion dollar budget.

[mb300sd]

I always use the maximum key size possible, usually 8192 or 16384... Takes a while to generate, but I never notice a difference when I'm actually using them.

[deepceleron]

They are creating a neural net to model your brain. Once it achieves consciousness, they can just ask it what password you would have used.

Hrm...
"According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. "

[MrTeal]

You would think that if the endgame was to bring down BTC, they could do it much cheaper than $2B.