Perhaps I am not reading the article correctly, but it sounds to me like RSA products can no longer be trusted.

No, it sounds like no product from any American company can be trusted as long as the current regime is in place.

At least that's the message that comes through loud and clear in the rest of the world.

That's quite a leap from the information in that article.

That article is merely one piece of information in a long chain (Echelon, the Snowden revelations, Lavabit), and all of them add up to the conclusion that you better not trust any US-based/originated IT security system.

What makes you think the NSA isn't willing to work with countries outside of the US, either directly or through another spy agency?

Willing, sure, but probably less able, at least outside of the close allies like the UK.

Why less able?

Are you seriously asking why a branch of the the USA's government has less power outside of the USA?

if you consider the fact that the nsa and cia often collaborate closely, and then look at the amount of influence the cia has often displayed in the past, towards foreign countries/regimes etc., gejjaxxita's question seems quite reasonable.

The same influence approach ($10m to choose a supposedly okay algorithm) would work just as well for most similar non-American companies, it isn't claimed that RSA did this because of some mandate which would fail if they'd be headquartered in, say, France.

Why keep the contract secret though?

TLDR: "RSA's contract made Dual Elliptic Curve the default option for producing random numbers in the RSA toolkit."

Dual_EC_DRBG was a NIST standard.

The end of RSA (the company)? I find it absurd that a security company no less, would hear many veteran cryptographers say this is backdoored a decade ago, and still going ahead and using it - as the default! Who stakes the whole reputation of their company in the field for a meager $10 million (I assume RSA was pretty big back then, too)? It's insane.

RSA, much like NIST, can not, and should not be trusted any longer. All of their customers should be warned, and advised to quit them ASAP. Companies need to learn this is just unacceptable.

Serious question: Is there an alternative? I've never seen a secure fob that wasn't from RSA.

I like Yubikeys: https://www.yubico.com/. They show up as a USB keyboard, so you don't have to type the codes in.

There are some disadvantages. Yubikeys use a shared secret instead of public key crypto. Also, the one-time password is iteration-based, not time-based. On the bright side, you can program Yubikeys with your own secrets. They may not be as secure as properly configured RSA tokens, but they're much better than authing with just a password or client cert.

Yubikey NEO (latest revision) is like the one you already have + a java card that comes with a PGPcard app (and supposedly, you can write your own apps)

They don't have a timer like the RSA key fobs, and need a USB or NFC connection - but are generally very reliable, and given their constraints.

The questiion, of course, is what reason you have to believe that yubico (and for that matter, gemalto, g10code and the rest) are not similarly in bed with the NSA.

Trusting trust :) This is one of, but not the main reasons why we build our own (Bloomberg B-Unit, PDF is the only good pic I see: http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/files/2013/11/b-unit_3...)

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Speaking of "trust", Bloomberg lost quite a lot of it when their reporters spied on their customers.

Bloomberg Spying Went On For Years After Execs Knew: Report http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/08/bloomberg-spying-went-on-fo...

You were probably just as horrified as most of the other employees at Bloomberg when that info became public. The bad apples cost Bloomberg a lot of reputation. My point is that "trust" is very elusive, very easy to lose, very hard to gain.

OTOH, are the "bad apples" at Bloomberg who condoned that behavior still in positions of power? Did they even get a slap on the wrist? If I were at Goldman, JPM, Citi, etc. I wouldn't "trust" Bloomberg until I saw some higher up people fall on their sword for that fiasco.

Fastmail uses the YubiKey for two factor authentication.

http://www.yubico.com/

Gemalto.

$10Mi? That's a very cheap price for trashing your companies reputation.

More importantly, it confirms that DRBD is backdoored or at least weak enough to be subverted.

[...] but RSA said in a statement: "RSA always acts in the best interest of its customers [...]

True, you just have to keep in mind that their customer is the NSA.

RSA is thinking they can claim ignorance in the case of the DRBG being weak / possibly backdoored.

I use one of these tokens for work. Spying is one thing but destroying encryption is another evil thing to do. If the NSA has introduced bugs in crypto then who's to say someone else can exploit the same crypto.

I don't think this fiasco is related to the tokens but yes the tokens has other problems such that it didn't need NSA to break it.

I wasn't sure I skimmed half the article. It did have a giant image of one the tokens though.

i wonder if Snowden has any detailed info on the NSA indroduced/forced backdoors (he obviously was aware about their existence in general like pretty much everybody in the world who isn't a tptacek's religious follower) and this or something like this is what keeps him alive - ie. NSA is afraid of dead man switch while other side(s) hopes that Snowden will reveal more and specifically useful for actual hacking info with time.

so that's the thing that scares me

a nsa official just did an obvious trial-balloon of pardoning snowden in exchange for return of all the docs [1]

but now that snowden is in russia, you have to assume that many nation-states have seen all these docs. so really, the nsa is worried that you and I will see them

fucking amazing

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/nsa-edward-snow...

From the BSAFE product page:

"RSA BSAFE Crypto Kernel offers versions of popular cryptographic algorithms optimized for both small code size and high performance. Unlike alternatives such as open source, our technology is backed by highly regarded cryptographic experts." [emphasis added]

Well NSA do have highly regarded crypto guys. And they do back the technology.

This is going to end RSA

This reminds me of the MS-Novell deal, which was done in a similar way and has similar problems.

I wonder if any of the executives involved with this deal will have a moment of clarity and make a public statement - "I was directly told by representatives of the U.S. Government that if we did not take this deal there would be direct and material consequences for both my company and myself. Here is the names of the people I met with, here is a log of the meetings. If I am jailed or in some other fashion publicly discredited through an otherwise seemingly unrelated matter in the future, you should always remember that I have made this public statement."

Think of it from the executives perspective:

Option A: keep mouth shut, make a shit ton of money

Option B: become a martyr, face prison time

People like Snowden are rare.

And what if it were very common to take jobs just to hack the internal network, scour it for sensitive-looking data, and dump it all publicly for the sake of fame? I am pretty sure most "executives" would not be happy with that norm

Those aren't the only options. Anyone with any smarts can figure out how to quietly and anonymously leak a lot of these details. The fact is that they were too cowardly to do even that though.

As somebody who has been in IT for almost two decades, I can't think of a safe way to get a file off our corporate LAN without leaving a trail leading to me.

I realize it's an argument from ignorance fallacy, and maybe there are such ways, but I'm not aware of them.

>People like Snowden are rare.

In all honesty, Snowden is a 30 year old single dude, and as far as I know, he doesn't have kids. Do you think he would have done what he did if he had a family to look after?

In my opinion a person's first responsibility is to their family. So yeah, if you're married (like these executives probably are) and you're facing the choice between option A and option B, you should absolutely pick option A.

Snowden had a girlfriend, AFAIK.

What are you saying? That because Snowden didn't have an extension to his own bloodline that it was easy for himself to come forward and blow the whistle?

So the nuclear family combined with a distributed economy is basically a convenient tool for justifying atrocities of all kinds. Just feeding the kids, right?

Maybe not having kids is actually the morally correct choice, then?

Don't be a fool. You would let your children go hungry and live a worse life (directly because of your actions) out of principle? It's not simple. Having a family can be a beautiful thing. Not having one and spilling the beans on something morally reprehensible can be too.

Don't be a fool.

Classy.

You would let your children go hungry and live a worse life

No. Read what I wrote. The words are right there.

If the choice is "have children and commit evil to feed them" and "don't have children and don't commit evil", I choose the former. As should, I think, any right-thinking person.

The question is probabilistic. What are the chances that the former happens? What are the chances that the latter happens?

Choose accordingly.

The question is also systemic. There exists the possibility that forces larger than the individual have decided to normalize the nuclear family (and also romanticize the vision of having said family) in order to serve evil ends. What is the probability that that is the case? As time goes on, it looks far more probable than we once thought. People like you think families are in themselves beautiful. Any means justify the ends of preserving them. Seems like an excellent tool for keeping a population right where you want them.

Look up the history of the nuclear family. Notice it didn't exist pre-industrialization. Why's that?

You're taking humans -> have children for granted. I'm arguing against that dogma. Because as paradoxical as it may sound, it is trite dogma at this point in wealthy societies. We don't need these additional people, we don't need this extravagant life. It's not a matter of survival anymore. So what is it all accomplishing? What's the end?

Having a family can be a beautiful thing.

For my morality, concerns of beauty don't trump concerns of humanity. If my having children perpetuates a cycle of exploitation, murder, pain, suffering, etc. etc. etc, then I don't have children. Regardless of how "beautiful" my experience of those children may be. It really is that simple.

And if a (wo)man tells me "I just did it to feed my kids" after committing some reprehensible act, I sympathize, because (s)he made a terrible decision in having children to start with. But I still condemn him/her.

That's a good point actually. Maybe we need more ethical loners without emotional attachments in a positions of power.

Like a celibate priesthood?

Maybe, we, as a community, could lessen that dilemma by helping the families of martyrs.

Other executives have.

Look at what happened to Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio after challenging illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping requests. (Hint: he just got out of federal prison about two months ago.)

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230398390... Mr. Nacchio said he still believes his insider-trading prosecution was government retaliation for rebuffing requests in 2001 from the National Security Agency to access his customers' phone records. His plans to use that belief as a defense at trial never materialized; some of the evidence he wanted to use was deemed classified and barred from being introduced. To Mr. Nacchio, the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents saying the agency monitors the email and phone records of Americans, have justified his own stance. He contended the NSA's request was illegal. "I feel vindicated," he said. "I never broke the law, and I never will."

Nacchio defrauded shareholders out of millions of dollars. Let's be careful about who we're valorizing.

I'm generally curious about this. I have no idea how to judge Nacchio's career. Can you point some facts proving this point of view?

Or maybe: How was his position any different than yours, if you had a request from the NSA that you wouldn't want to fulfil, knowing that rejecting it could destroy your company, what would you do?

The issue is, imo, very murky but as I understand it:

NSA approached Nacchio and Qwest to do what they were doing with AT&T and Verizon. Qwest had previously helped the NSA intercept all comms in Salt Lake City during the Olympics but told the NSA they weren't interested in cooperating. Nacchio sells some stock. Qwest is suddenly dropped as the favored vendor for a huge government contract leading to a drop in Qwest's share price and earnings.

The US federal goverment's position was that Nacchio knew the contract was going to get dropped and cashed out early - insider trading. Nacchio contended that he was just selling stock and that the government had pulled the contract to entrap and prosecute him in the current case.

Read the indictment. Nacchio was convicted along with several other executives of running a pump and dump scam.

Despite being specifically prohibited from trading based on insider information, Nacchio first became aware that their earnings guidance was "a huge stretch", that to meet them would involve growing revenue from a line of business that had been failing to grow revenue and that had actually been underperforming that year, that they had (apparently) lost important contracts, and that it had become essentially impossible for them to hit their numbers. Then, after learning all that, but before any of it was disclosed to investors, Nacchio dumped over $100MM worth of his stock.

Nacchio controlled the earnings targets for Qwest. He set them dishonestly high and allowed them to be released to the public over the objections of many of his own executives. The stock performed as a result. Then, when it became obvious that the public would soon learn that those projections were impossible to meet, he sold his stock for $100MM.

Nacchio went down within a year of Enron and just a few years after Worldcom. It was the end of an era in which the big accounting firms had conspired with large corporations to swindle the public out of billions of dollars. Nacchio was a crook, not a Fourth Amendment hero.

Are the executives at JPMC crooks? I don't know. If they are, which is not outside the realm of possibility, they should go down too. But what JPMC people do has nothing at all to do with the fact that Qwest's executives defrauded the public to the tune of over $100MM.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6942165 tptacek 5 hours ago | link I am not generally a believer in the theory that NSA actively subverts Internet standards† †(my best guess is that the standards NSA was actively subverting were about international telephony; subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft)

Does this count?(not trying to be sarcastic or a smart-a##), I just want to get a handle on what I should or should not trust these days. Seeing that RSA SecurID VPN dongle pic in the article scared me. I've pretty much been looking to your comments to give me a baseline.

Personally, I think one of the things you can't trust these days are comments by tptacek.

Either you're insinuating that 'tptacek is a malicious actor, or that he's incompetent. That's a pretty serious allegation to make without providing any evidence whatsoever. Do you have any? I'm sure you can dig up a few examples of things that he said which were incorrect, but very few of those will not have been followed by a correction at some point, and either way your insinuations seem to go beyond "being wrong some of the time".

HN is incredibly fortunate to count members like 'tptacek as part of its community. We should be behaving in ways which encourage more comments and commenters of his ilk, not less.

Unsurprisingly you're already being down-voted. For a community that prides itself on being rational and home to spirited debate, when it comes to the NSA, any contrarian opinions (or even alternative perspectives) tend to be quickly attacked and silenced.

If you read some of the first threads when the NSA revelations broke out, there are heated discussions with various viewpoints and arguments. Now, it appears that most of these users have become tired of being instantly downvoted, and instead avoid these subjects entirely.

I hope that tptacek continues to participate in these security policy discussions, not only for his extensive domain knowledge, but also because he is not afraid to voice beliefs that disagree with prevailing opinion. And right or wrong, its very refreshing.

Do you have any?

Don't really have a dog in this fight, but: up until today, there was no evidence "the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products".

Were people wrong to be suspicious?

As much as he can get under one's skin, and as much as he can be abrasive, and any number of other things, I trust his opinions on security and crypto.

He's rational to a fault--unfortunately, that means that when facts change he may be left with egg on his face. I don't think there's anything wrong with how he's handled this stuff.

...I trust his opinions on security and crypto.

And here, ladies and gents, is exactly why we'll continue to inhabit an exploitable world forevermore.

Trusting tptacek in the form of completing and learning from the Matasano crypto challenges would lead to a much less exploitable world forevermore.

It's okay to provisionally trust the word of someone who has previously and clearly demonstrated actual competence.

I disagree with many of tptacek's opinions but honestly he's one of the reasons this site is great. He is capable of arguing with people with strongly opposing views with civility, which is something that is entirely too rare these days. He's also capable of admitting when he's wrong and being gracious when proven right. Also entirely too rare these days. I'd rather have a thousand tptaceks on this site than zero.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944628

Jesus, what a tool you are.

How very civil and gracious.

Sometimes it's tough to contain righteous internet rage. I think he knows that crossed the line and that is why he deleted the comment.

He is capable of arguing with people with strongly opposing views with civility

You're clearly talking about a different tptacek, widely known on this site for his coarsely abrasive, impossibly high friction, social interactions and not admitting he's wrong on issues trivial or important. He's also widely known for a being an expert in his field.

All that being said, I agree with you that this site is more valuable with him on it and regularly participating. He's one of the actual experts in their field that makes this a much better forum than any other. IMHO, it's well worth the comment burn to talk and debate (friendly or not) with somebody of his caliber.

And being wrong every once in a while (regardless of his rightness in this case) does not make him either incompetent or malicious. It just makes him human.

tptacek, widely known on this site for his coarsely abrasive, impossibly high friction, social interactions and not admitting he's wrong on issues trivial or important. He's also widely known for a being an expert in his field.

What are you talking about? Whatever caricature you're illustrating here is not Thomas Ptacek.

With the way you've been talking, I would've suspected you were a newer member, but you've been around for three years or so. So I simply have no idea what you're talking about.

Would you please point out precisely which comments you take issue with? https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=by%3Atpta...

I think the thing to remember about Thomas, and me, and everyone else, is that we're all human, and we all have different moods which influence our behavior. Thomas's, on average, is exemplary.

I'm glad to see that he's got both of us defending him.

I'm talking about the same tptacek who I've personally butted heads with where he couldn't even accept being wrong about how to make stew (looking back, that was exactly 1 year ago to the day!)

I respect tptacek very much for his domain knowledge and expertise. He has great theories on hiring practices and cooking among others. He's one of the names I look for on HN.

But he requires lots of care and effort. I have to mentally peel back about half of his posts to remove the snark and assholery and get to the juicy bits. But those bits are usually there and usually worth the effort to get to.

That's okay, I'm a grown up and can deal with high friction in order to enjoy interacting with somebody who's truly intelligent. tptacek is just one of those types that comes with lots of smarts and lots of difficult personality and that's okay.

And for the record I'm also aware that I can be rather high friction and assholish as well, and not nearly as insightful as tptacek.

EDIT: You know what, I'm not going to dignify this any further, other than to say that I don't want HN to be however you think HN should be. By saying "he requires lots of care and effort," you're discouraging people like Thomas from participating, and therefore making our community worse as a result. How would you feel if you saw someone talking like that about you?

After reading tptacek's comments in the latest thread about Telegram https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940665 I can only agree. He insisted Telegram team should abandon its custom solution without providing any actual proof that it's vulnerable. His advice was to rely only on "modern" algorithms (mostly the ones included in "NSA Suite B Cryptography"), but he provided zero evidence why these algorithms should be more secure than the ones already in use.

This is a really bad and somewhat frustrating comment (if you're trolling, nicely done). He's absolutely correct about Telegram and this is not how you run crypto contests. This isn't even a tptacek opinion, it's a "everybody who has any reputation in the crypto field" opinion.

Edit: Oh, you're the Telegram employee who designed the contest. I encourage you to read moxie's blog post, and Schneiers rebuttals to crypto contests that are probably linked all over your other threads.

I think Pavel is providing the financial backing for Telegram, rather than being an employee -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov

Ah, the Telegram HN account just said he "proposed the contest", so I assumed employee. If he is the financier, then it is not surprising that he doesn't understand why his crypto contest is a bad idea.

right and it also explains why the Telegram guys went ahead with his suggestion, because they're presumably keen to keep their main financial backer happy.

I don't think there's any attempt to sell snakeoil here, this is a case of a road to hell being paved with good intentions. To people not well versed in cryptography the things Pavel is saying and the approach Telegram is taking all seem completely reasonable, and the people who do do crypto and are responding might as well be talking a different language. To them the flaws and red flags are so obvious that their responses are incredulous, which has led to the vitriolic back and forth we've seen - neither side can comprehend the other's position. This is Dunning-Kruger[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

With all due respect, nothing can be "obvious" unless it is proven. You cannot take something for granted just because a respected cryptographer says that. Not after we learned that NSA pushes backdoors using respected firms and people in the crypto-community.

The wish to broaden the contest is understandable and already taken into account http://bit.ly/1htlEod

What I was saying in the comment above, however, had nothing to do with the contest. I expressed concern about tptacek's aggressive promotion of one algorithms (branded as "modern") over the other (claimed as "anachronistic") without any substantial proof. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6941934

This is really alarming.

Could you please provide some proof that you are who you claim you are? Like a post on your VK page? Thanks.

This comment on VK by id1 (Pavel) clearly states he participates in recent HN threads. I think it's fairly safe to assume he is who he is.

https://vk.com/roem?w=wall-20537665_23327

Here's an unedited Google Translate translation (I read it, and I think it conveys the message):

As I see it , there is not so much Anonymus as creators local competitor - TextSecure under Android . Telegram gathered a lot of users , and they're rightly fuss . The boys are torn between argument " either too new algorithm , why is it , if there is a proven " and your " algorithm either too old , why is it when new ." Nevertheless , trade on HN gives thousands of registrations Anglo-Saxons and tons of references .

I think the debate will be a good end to the competition announcement decoding traffic Telegram. Let's say I was ready to open all of my correspondence traffic since registration in Telegram and give $ 200,000 to anyone who will decipher it and tell you how . As a result Telegram or detect and close the loophole for special services, or - more likely - will receive another proof of the inviolability of their protocol

Eagerly awaiting tptacek's retraction to his insistence that this was not a backdoor.

Edit: Nevermind, apparently he already did a mere 8 hours ago, replying to my own comment. Shortly before this broke.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6941366

Your reaction to this story was wondering if it can be used to demonstrate another member of HN being wrong in the past? Petty

Not just 'another member of HN', the most high-rated, the most prolific member of HN who is very often found shaping the direction of discussions here and is now a considerable voice in the security community. He's also someone that new tech startup founders listen to when deciding what to use and what not to use.

When 'tptacek is wrong, he's obnoxiously wrong, especially in his inability to believe in government misbehavior, and his willingness to denigrate "message board nerds" on that sort of matter. (See also his attacks on Greenwald when the Snowden story started.) So personally I was looking forward to seeing somebody comment about him.

Pretty much. Not only that, but he's incredibly influential, so to see him get knocked down a peg does a lot of good.

This is a bit much and was not at all the motivation behind my comment.

This is what happens when you make it personal, though. I try to let being right be its own reward, not a license to tell people how wrong they were.

tptacek has the most karma on HN (even moreso than pg): https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders (for reference, pg has 149712 karma at the time of writing; tptacek has 165020 and the next person has 88887) His opinion is respected by many (and many accept what he says without question). A retraction by tptacek reminds us all to think critically

lawnchair_larry's comment is equivalent to questioning the president or a major celebrity, which oftentimes isn't a personal grudge.

What I do is just not read the usernames (beyond roughly scanning the word to figure out who replied to who). No really, I mean that, I don't even know your username.

That makes for a wonderful experience really. I interact with this nameless entity and each post is largely valued by its responses (I often leave an article open for a few hours to let the comments ripen a bit, that also adds a lot).

Yeah, I get that a lot too. Also his attitude towards open source cryptography related projects is strange and totally unjustified imho.

"RSA, now a subsidiary of computer storage giant EMC Corp, urged customers to stop using the NSA formula after the Snowden disclosures revealed its weakness." - Just shake my head at this. As news is revealed that all these companies were complicit, they cry foul and "warn" users? RSA deserves to lose all international customers who refuse to buy their products because of hidden backdoors.

What implications does this have for RSA?

Hopefully the end of them. It's the only thing that matters to these mercenaries...

The NSA's story about how they need to secretly do these things to fight the war on terror makes less sense with each new revelation.

Terrorists don't use VPN dongles.

What is really going on here?

You are making an assumption that the primary target of SIGINT is terrorists, but in reality it's actually nation states. I think another story just came out today about GCHQ targeting EU officials and embassies.

Nation states are likely to roll their own dongles though. The folk that use these are bluechips meeting due diligence requirements.

Heh...I certainly had a good chuckle at this comment. I don't honestly think that the NSA ever paid more than lip-service to the "war on terror". They've been doing the same job since long before Sept. 11, 2001. Before the "war on terror" it was the "cold war", there just happens to have been an awkward gap in between...

The NSA is in the business of Signals Intelligence. Their job, plainly stated, is to have access to as much communication between non-US entities as humanly possible. What makes their job difficult is that, over the course of the last few decades, it's become increasingly the case that much of the communication between non-US entities travels via US-based channels using technology originated in the US. Somewhere along the line, when forced to balance "as much communication" and "non-US entities", the NSA clearly chose in favor of accessing those communications at any cost.

This is a very well-put comment.

The core cause there would seem to be sharing comm channels with foriegn actors--the same thing that makes our position with regards to the 'net so awesome also means that the NSA is kind of forced to get involved closer to home. It's a tricky tradeoff.

Shouldn't this destroy RSA as a company? If your in security, and your security can't be trusted...

It should, but AT&T's still in business and their collaboration with the state to spy on customers has been known for a long time.

Please forgive my ignorance of these kinds of security issues....

I remember at one point, way back when, it was recommended to use RSA keys over DSA, when creating an SSH public key. Is this this the same algorithm, by the same company?

Does this mean that SSH can't be trusted if you're using an RSA key, versus some other type?

Who in their right mind would use an American technology product at this point? You would be an idiot to think that it wasn't backdoored by the NSA.

NSA invents weak (Back Door present) crypto algo.

Pushes RSA to make it a Default in a key function (RNG) by giving them $10 Million.

NSA points to RSA as an early adopter and gets NIST to certify it.

Millions of systems are now protected by an RSA product that the NSA deliberately weakened.

Any sufficiently skilled rogue actor can attack virtually any business that uses these RSA products -

NSA (Cyber security Command) gets even more money to "Protect" us from said Rogue actors.

So all-in-all good investment on their part

Edit: Spelling fixed per commenter pointing out the difference between rouge and rogue. I did imply malicious actors not red-cheeked actors (not that they are mutually exclusive).

Minor quibble (and yes I'm as outraged by this as you are) - but "rouge" means "a red powder or cream used as a cosmetic for coloring the cheeks or lips", whereas "rogue" means "a person or thing that behaves in an aberrant, faulty, or unpredictable way", which is what you mean in this comment.

Just a side note, rouge = red, rogue = villain/scoundrel/etc... I hate being that guy but it happened twice and triggered my have to post response.

Tshuß!

Just a side note, "Tschüß!" = bye/cheers/etc; "Tshuß!" = I can't spell German.

I hate being that guy but … wait, I'm lying, I love it, but I normally try to restrain myself.

How many times did you check your comment to make sure all grammar and punctuation is perfect? :)

Is wasn't perfect. There was a space between "but" and the ellipsis. Not to mention the several other mistakes.

It wasn't... You know, I hate being the guy that hate those who hate being that guy, but couldn't resist.

"You know, I hate being the guy that hate those who hate being that guy, but couldn't resist."

It is "I hate being the guy that hates those who hate being that guy" :-)

Which _several_ other mistakes?

There's enough wrong with what the NSA has been doing, and enough reasons to encourage people to take an interest in how to curtail, or at least better police, their actions without resorting to tawdry conspiracy theories.

The NSA doesn't "protect" anyone. They are an intelligence agency. Their mandate is to collect information. The group you're thinking of, the one that's actually supposed to "protect" the network, is US Cyber Command: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command

USCC doesn't protect anyone either. They, like most of the Department of "Defense", are almost entirely offense in nature.

The best defence is a good offence.

A catchy sound byte, but in almost all practical situations, the best defence is avoiding conflict. In fights: flee. In international affairs: diplomacy.

That is disasterous. That logic is why Chaimberlain allowed Hitler to get more and more and more power. ("Surely they'll agree to peace if we just let them have Poland.")

It is also why my generation (I'm 27) will eventually have to fight a nuclear war that pits Iran against Israel and possibly the US.

That war will potentially kill millions. And whose fault will it be? Obama's and Bush's. They will (if history is just and we don't change course) go down in history as potentially making mistakes that killed millions, just as Stalin and Hitler did.

Or we could insist now (or, ideally, a few years ago) that Iran not develop nuclear weapons capability, if necessary fighting a minor tactical war to stop them.

(There is NO reason to have Vietnam IV, where Afghanistan and Iraq are Vietnam II and III. Except of course socialism for defense contractors and altruism as we throw away trillions "re-building" the latter two countries.)

USA made a war claiming that Iraq had Nuclear weapons. Apparently it didn't. The only one who gained anything from Iraq war, were 7 USA-based oil companies.

Iran has lost the war vs Iraq a some years ago. As a European, I don't see Iran as a threat. But you probably do...

That's wrong. We do know that they had been trying to develop nuclear weapons for years. The first reactor was bought from France in the 70s and the Israelis bombed Iraq a few times to stop them from developing nuclear weapons. The same will happen with Iran if they do not stop enriching uranium above energy-related levels. Back to Iraq, there was evidence that was presented to Congress, and if you ask most of the people who voted to authorize the war based on the evidence, such as Hillary or John Kerry, they say they have no regrets in voting that way (i.e. http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/21/iraq.hillary/). Now, in hindsight, whether all that evidence was correct is an entirely different debate.

Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement which allowed Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia at the end of September 1938.

World War 2 started when Germany decided to invade Poland in late 1939. Germany was never given Poland.

You get even the most basic history wrong and then proceed to say that Bush and Obama are historically equivalent to Stalin and Hitler?

Never let facts get in the way of a good dogma.

World War 2 started when Germany decided to invade Poland in late 1939.

Germany and the Soviet Union. Sure, the Soviets attacked after the Germans, but they split Poland between them before the invasion.

The reality is that Britain wasn't ready. Chamberlain bought us the time needed to power up to fight the Battle of Britain in 1940. Which we won. 2 years later, having profited from selling weapons to both sides, America sees which way the wind is blowing and decides to join the winning team.

PS You forgot Clinton bombing pharmaceutical plants in Sudan, then taking his eye off the ball to play his sax, schmooze with Hollywood and chase skirts, while the wheels of 9/11 were set inexorably in motion.

Your contortions, while amusing, rewrite history in order to maintain your unhealthy obsession with America's alleged wickedness. Sure, Europe won the war and the US tagged along. Right. Whatever you need to believe to try to hold your precious worldview together, reality be damned.

It is also why my generation (I'm 27) will eventually have to fight a nuclear war that pits Iran against Israel and possibly the US.

No, we won't. There is simply no geopolitical logic to Iran and Israel going to war.

Umm, Iran is run by a council of religious fanatics. There is no logic to Iran.

Asymmetric warfare with multiple adversaries doesn't work that way. For example, Stuxnet did not make U.S power plants safe from malicious attackers. I recommend reading Ralph Langner's op-ed in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/04/do-cyberatta...

It did make word temporarily safer from Iran nuclear bomb though. Of course, it is only temporary, but almost everything you do is.

As for the article, it claims that Stuxnet "opened the Pandora box", but it did nothing of the sort. Stuxnet by itself did not enable anything that wasn't possible before - it was possible for malicious actors to create attacks on US networked infrastructure, and it still is. Stuxnet changed nothing there. Criminals and security professionals know the possibilities for a long time. And are using them. Making it sound as if the evil US has again spoiled the paradise for everyone makes no sense, and the author, being the expert in the field, should have known better, but looks like his political views overcame his professional judgement here.

Does anyone series believe that Iran is a threat to the world. How about basing threat levels on previous actions? For example, who invades countries most often? Or who's military kills the most people? I've heard about WMD threats before - and who did the invading and killing in the end? That saga ended with almost everyone looking bad.

Yes, Iran's totalitarian leadership is a threat to its neighbors, particularly Israel.

Define "threat to the world". Can Iran destroy the whole world? Fortunately, not. Can Iran destabilize, hurt and incite violence? Not only can, it is doing it right now.

>> basing threat levels on previous actions?

That would be stupid because it means that only the second action can be countered. Given how first action can cause devastating consequences, limiting oneself to only reacting to a second one would be terminally stupid. American administration, for example, was justly criticized for sleeping through 9/11, and acting unprepared when it happened. Generals like to prepare for the past wars, it is much easier, but there's no reason to condone such behavior.

>> who invades countries most often?

Invasions can differ. If Nazi Germany invaded Poland once, and Britain invaded Nazi Germany once, they are not equal.

>> who's military kills the most people?

Again, depends on the people. If Al-Qaida kills 3000 Americans in 9/11, and then Americans kill 10000 Al-Qaida fighters after that, I'd say good job, they only should have done it earlier, so we would have 3000 less victims.

>> That saga ended with almost everyone looking bad.

It looks bad to you because you take an impossible position that fighting evil should be done without hurting anyone. It would be nice if there was a nice, fluffy, unicorn-land evil that you could fight by issuing a strongly-worded declaration of condemnation and maybe refuse to send them a Christmas card next time. Unfortunately, real evil is much harder and messier to fight.

Not if you're a 800-pound gorilla against 30kg monkeys...

Then offense is just offence.

Enough monkeys could take even 800-pound gorilla. In fact, it is considered a common knowledge that some bipedal monkeys regularly took 16000-pound mammoths, ate them and made dwellings out of their bones. So if I were a gorilla I wouldn't underestimate 30kg monkeys. Especially if they have advanced weaponry.

In theory maybe.

In actual life, the 800-pound gorilla is beating the shit out of monkeys, invades their villages, pushes them diplomatically, installs his lackey-monkeys in power in their jungles, and steals their resources.

And he counts any nick or scratch on his body (inflicted by the monkeys tiny hands) as worthy of the lives of 10,000 monkeys -- which he considers almost subhuman and even talks openly of "bombing them back to stone age".

Oh, and he maintains that he's the righteous and good one in all this, and it's doing it for their own good.

"As part of the National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54), signed on January 8, 2008 by President Bush, the NSA became the lead agency to monitor and protect all of the federal government's computer networks from cyber-terrorism." [Emphasis added]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA#Mission

Yes but their funding is not dependent on how secure RSA tokens are.

NSA did this to advance their mission, not to make a few extra bucks.

No conspiracy theory requried, as it does not require /intention/ on the part of the NSA. This can simply be Pavlov-style reinforcement: misguided ideas get amplified by rewarding the behaviour with budget increases.

No conspiracy theory requried

Conspiracy doesn't mean aliens and Disney being frozen.

It just means people/organisations doing something together in secret.

What the NSA and partners have done is very much a conspiracy -- by definition.

As the great writer Gore Vidal once put it, "Americans have been trained by media to go into Pavlovian giggles at the mention of 'conspiracy' because for an American to believe in a conspiracy he must also believe in flying saucers or, craziest of all, that more than one person was involved in the JFK murder."

...which is why Theo Deraadt is now suddenly everyone's best friend, despite his personality. :) OpenSSH and its mother project, OpenBSD, are now all that is left of our civilization's freedom to think.

Thanks, Theo, for never selling us out; for being such an uncompromising bastard; for not being like the RSA. May Athena gird you for war against the Spartans.

If it only cost $10m to bribe one of the biggest security companies around, how much does it cost to bribe a single open source developer who volunteers on tools like OpenSSL? What if you add blackmail to the mix?

Makes me realize that we need bitcoin-style "hack or bruteforce our encryption schemes and you can legitimately get paid lots of money" bug bounties.

This is why you want some people who are not primarily motivated by money. (Neither necessarily ascetics.)

In turn, why you want a society where a decent quality of life is not just obtainable but reliable without an all-consuming level of competition with others. (E.g. an independent researcher can actually gain access to and participate in a large and reasonably priced health insurance risk pool. And where money is not the overriding, if not sole, determination of judicial proceedings.)

Going very general in my comment, security is both a community effort and a personal responsibility. The more we "outsource" our own security ("Just trust us." -- Three Letter Agencies and private contractors), the more the price goes up while the quality of the results goes down.

You get the government you pay for, or... if you are more concerned about a quality, effective government, the government you participate in.

Hopefully, the pendulum is beginning to swing back from "pay for" to "participate in".

Luckily, open source can't include secret code. That's the point.

Its a sad commentary on a lack of ethics in parts of the tech industry. This industry isn't leading us where we want to go.

I'm getting a "Page Not Found" message.Here's another version of the article: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/us-usa-security-rs...

RSA is commercially dead. There's no excuse.

Also, closed-source hardware HSMs are blackboxes that are fundamentally paranoia-inducing. There's no reason to trust that the vendor, supply chain and/or manufacturers didn't backdoor them or introduce other attack surfaces. The only way to trust an implementation is decap a sample of ASICs and match features against masks you generated... from sources you trust (whether open source or yours).

If it's a black box, there's no way to trust it (all modern CPUs, N/S-bridge, memory, flash (ssd), hd controllers, on and on.)

Conclusion: We need more open-source hardware that is production-quality (BSD licensed)! This would be very expensive in terms of people time, but it's necessary move since corporations can't be trusted.

"RSA always acts in the best interest of its customers and under no circumstances does RSA design or enable any back doors in our products. Decisions about the features and functionality of RSA products are our own."

This means one of two things: Either this is a blatant lie by RSA, or RSA is not competent enough to evaluate cryptograpic algorithms. Neither possibility paints them in a favorable light.