CHILLING AL QAEDA SLAY PLOTS

New York Post ^ | 11/23/02 | NILES LATHEM

[kattracks]

November 23, 2002 -- WASHINGTON - The newest prize al Qaeda captive has given U.S. intelligence agents chilling details about massive terrorist plots to attack commercial and military ships in the Persian Gulf region with planes and scuba divers, The Post has learned.

[Cindy]

GOOGLE Search Term: "Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22Abd+al+Rahim+al-Nashiri%22&btnG=Google+Search

[Spruce]

He was captured with a satellite phone and a laptop ...
Cloned and 'crypted. Nothing to see here. I bet he had PGP on the laptop.

[Humidston]

Thanks for the Google search, Cindy. I glanced at the list of Islamists from the Houston Chronicle and it's interesting that they didn't list Mullah Omar. I wonder why? (Rhetorical question)

[AmericaUnited]

The NSA has bee able to crack PGP a long time ago.

[backhoe]

Here's a little different search- Google News Beta:

-Searched news for Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri. (BETA) Results 1 - 10 of about 896--

[dinodino]

So? I hope he did--false sense of security for those guys.

[freepersup]

"Al-Nashiri, a close associate of Osama bin Laden and one of the top 10 al Qaeda leaders, was arrested as he was fleeing Yemen for Malaysia following the CIA's dramatic missile strike Nov. 3 on a car carrying six key al Qaeda terrorists." Replicate this modus operandi- Strike fast and furious with a high profile operation, then... watch the escape routes out of said territories for fleeing vermin. Snatch, extradite, interrorgate, exterminate.

[freepersup]

Snatch, extradite, interrorgate, exterminate. i-n-t-e-r-r-o-g-a-t-e (by all means terrorize these murderers with terror during interrogations)

[InterceptPoint]

The NSA has bee able to crack PGP a long time ago.

Are you guessing about this or do you have some hard facts? PGP is pretty good.

[RWG]

Every day makes little tommy dashole look stupider and stupider.

[samtheman]

Good word, interrorgate.

[coloradan]

PGP is not authorized for encryption of classified information. It's hard to crack, but a "funded effort" at the level of a goverment can crack it. I have also heard that passphrase protected messages are more secure than public-key protected ones, and that multiple levels of encryption, encrypting already encrypted messages with different keys, is more secure still. But still crackable by the NSA.

[AmericaUnited]

Of course if I had hard evidense to support my statement (the NSA can crack PGP), I would not be sharing it with you. :)

There have been several private successful attempts at cracking RSA. Read below. Then imagine what the NSA can do with orders of magnitude more computing power, both human and machine.

---

Two RSA-encrypted messages have been cracked publicly.

First, there is the RSA-129 key. The inventors of RSA published a message encrypted with a 129-digits (430 bits) RSA public key, and offered $100 to the first person who could decrypt the message. In 1994, an international team coordinated by Paul Leyland, Derek Atkins, Arjen Lenstra, and Michael Graff successfully factored this public key and recovered the plaintext. The message read:

THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
They headed a huge volunteer effort in which work was distributed via E-mail, fax, and regular mail to workers on the Internet, who processed their portion and sent the results back. About 1600 machines took part, with computing power ranging from a fax machine to Cray supercomputers. They used the best known factoring algorithm of the time; better methods have been discovered since then, but the results are still instructive in the amount of work required to crack a RSA-encrypted message.

The coordinators have estimated that the project took about eight months of real time and used approximately 5000 MIPS-years of computing time.

What does all this have to do with PGP? The RSA-129 key is approximately equal in security to a 426-bit PGP key. This has been shown to be easily crackable by this project. PGP used to recommend 384-bit keys as "casual grade" security; recent versions offer 512 bits as a recommended minimum security level.

Note that this effort cracked only a single RSA key. Nothing was discovered during the course of the experiment to cause any other keys to become less secure than they had been.

A year later, the first real PGP key was cracked. It was the infamous Blacknet key, a 384-bits key for the anonymous entity known as "Blacknet". A team consisting of Alec Muffett, Paul Leyland, Arjen Lenstra and Jim Gillogly managed to use enough computation power (approximately 1300 MIPS) to factor the key in three months. It was then used to decrypt a publicly-available message encrypted with that key.

The most important thing in this attack is that it was done in almost complete secrecy. Unlike with the RSA-129 attack, there was no publicity on the crack until it was complete. Most of the computers only worked on it in spare time, and the total power is well within reach of a large, perhaps even a medium sized organization.

[Righty1]

Buuuttt the demonRats didn't like the missle strike as it was a "summary execution"! Could you see that dwarf Daxhole trying to read snipers on Iwo their rights.

[unequallawsuntoasavagerace]

Of course if I had hard evidense to support my statement (the NSA can crack PGP), I would not be sharing it with you. :)

This morning I had spent a couple hours making a google based search looking for any statement or evidence that indicated PGP had in any way been compromised. Given the evolution of this 'product' since it's earlier days of internet distribution, my concern was twofold:
- that a new weakness was found that made cracking PGP practical.
- that the newer version were compromised to allow the access which the NSA had been demanding.
I found some good tutorials on the variables associated with PGP which remind us that anything can be cracked, but not in a 'practical' time frame. I did not find any source that supported the two concerns I had.
If you can point me to some evidence that relates to those two concerns, I'd be greatful.

[gatorbait]

The NSA has bee able to crack PGP a long time ago.

Are you guessing about this or do you have some hard facts? PGP is pretty good.


True,but, the NSA is better ,though

[AmericaUnited]

If you can point me to some evidence that relates to those two concerns, I'd be greatful.

You won't get hard evidence. You have to infer these things. Read the couple of references about how "amateurs" with limited means cracked RSA. Extrapolate to an agency that employs 40,000 mathematicians, some of the brightest, and has simply staggering computing power.

Any real info on this subject is beyond top-secret. No one's going to blow a trumpet and go on '60 Minutes'. If they did, it would mean certain hard prison time.

[Squantos]

Your take on Winthrop Diffie and his abilities to include the Diffie-Hellman algorithm would intrest me if ya have time to comment ? You seem to have a better than average understanding of cryptology.

Stay Safe !

[AmericaUnited]

More food for thought...

managed to use enough computation power (approximately 1300 MIPS) to factor the key in three months.

Here's the stats on the latest "commerically available" Cray.

The Cray X1 system, designed to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer product, features ultra-fast (12.8 gigaflops) individual processors, up to 819 gigaflops of peak computing power in a single chassis, and a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect for substantially more efficient scaling than on clustered SMP systems. The Cray X1 system is available with up to 52.4 teraflops of peak computing power.

So, using 1.3 million MIPS, it took the amateurs 3 months. Assuming the NSA has and uses just one of Cray's fully populated systems (more like hundreds), with 52.4 trillion FLOPS, (at least 40 thousand times the computing power, since FLOPS are less than MIPS), imagine how long it would take them to crack the key. Now imagine them using tens-hundreds of these systems. The little guy really doesn't have to worry since this "valuable" computing power is not going to be wasted cracking your PGP encrypted email to your cousin about bootleg software. LOL!

I just read where IBM was building a system for the government that could do several hundred peta (a million trillion) flops.