Posted on 04/12/2006 12:45:55 PM PDT by teddyruxpin
INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS: Phone Taps Just Got Impossible
April 12, 2006: Eavesdropping on phone calls just got a lot harder. Phil Zimmermann, the guy who invented PGP encryption for Internet mail, has developed a similar product, Zfone, for VOIP (telephone calls over the Internet). Zfone, like PGP, is free and easy to use. PGP drove intelligence agencies nuts, because it gave criminals and terrorists access to industrial grade cryptography. PGP doesn't stop the police or intel people from reading encrypted email, but it does slow them down. Zfone, however, uses stronger encryption. This means more delays, perhaps fatal delays, in finding out what the bad guys are saying. There's no immediate solution for this problem, unless Phil Zimmermann has provided a back door in Zfone for the intel folks. That is unlikely, but at least possible.
My company uses VOIP and we encrypt it as far as we can. Company's secrets (which would include more than enough to enable identity theft) should remain secret.
Also what my wife and I are planning to do later in the evening should remain our secret not some hacker or govt listener seeking titilation. I love encryption and I thank Phil Zimmerman for helping us maintain our privacy.
For those that think we don't have to guard our privacy if we aren't doing anything illegal, please let me put a web cam in your bedroom and sell viewing rights on the web (hopefully it'll be interesting enough to make money)
You said -- "Public key PGP encryption can be broken?"
That's exactly what I was thinking. As far as what I've read, it's impossible to crack. Has that changed now?
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- "I'm still missing the part that makes decryption impossible."
PGP was impossible to crack. If that's so, then making it stronger is making it "more" impossible.
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- "Zimmerman is a terrorist enabler."
He's never been considered that. This is something that has never been suggested (or stated) before. So, it's something that is, apparently, "new" with you.
He's been around for quite a long while and there have been court cases surrounding the issue of PGP and getting it out to the public. So, he wouldn't be considered any more of a terrorist enabler than Tyson's Chicken would be if they shipped their chickens to the hills of Pakistan where bin Ladin is hiding out.
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- "ANY encryption scheme that is used more than once can be broken (though not necessarily easily)."
That statement is not in line with testimony that was given to Congress about PGP. It was stated (by the government) that it was uncrackable (because they were arguing against getting it out to the public). So, where do you have publicized documents showing that it has been cracked?
Regards,
Star Traveler
L
Oh, cool. I always liked PGP.
You said -- "NSA could 'brute force' it, but it would take a while. Unless they got real lucky that is."
I think it's like someone else said here on this thread -- the time it takes for the "heat death" of the universe.
You or I won't be around.
Regards,
Star Traveler
This bears repeating.
LOL! Yes I'm laughing at YOU! and not with you. I suppose computer makers are terrorist enablers too? You drove the IQ level of this thread down by a good 100 points.
A decade ago there was a debate about whether encryption technologies that didn't have a government-approved backdoor should be banned. Al Gore and John Ashcroft were on opposing sides of the issue. Guess whose side you're on.
I've read--although I can't tell you the math--that the more encrypted data you have from a key pair, the easier the pair is to crack. Those longer-than-the-age-of-the-universe decryption times are for cases where you don't have any data but the public key. But if keys are changed frequently, it's just about as strong. (I've read.)
Of course, a quantum computer can factor a big number with only a few operations. It would not surprise me in the least to hear that the NSA has them.
I wonder: to what extent might a sentence be understandable or recoverable, based on cadence alone? Most likely not everything could be understood: "yes" seems as if it should end up the same as "no" when encrypted, but perhaps not...but how far could it work? Syllable counting at least should be possible. If someone sang the ABC song, that should be detectable (and even distinguishable from "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"). So cadence gives more information than nothing, but how much, if you really pushed it?
Food for thought.
You're touching on something that is, or so I've read, a significant part of the practice of cryptography and counter-espionage. The ~probabilities~ of word patterns and cadences of speech-- and for that matter writing-- do play a part in breaking codes.
Any additional information about the document or voice sample only improves the reliability of the probability model. Who the speaker is, the general subject matter, the locations... whatever. All you need is for some hits to start falling into place and it becomes sometimes possible to nail the entire key.
I'm not an expert on the topic, but I've done some interesting reading.
Only via brute force as far as I know (and this leads to the conundrum of recognizing the clear text from a large number of same sized candidates), and it involves factoring a large (~600 digit) number into two (~300 digit) primes. Knowing the values of the two primes vs. the value of their product is what distinguishes the public and private keys. So far as I know, there is no proactive (non trial-and-error) way to do this. As massive processing power becomes more economical, it becomes more feasible, but the key length can be increased.
That post makes no sense. It's estimated that over 100,000 Chinese use proxy bouncing daily to get around the Chinese internet filters. Iranians have also been using proxies like crazy since the Mullahs bought and implemented the filtering technology.
Simply put, if Zimmerman didn't develop this, someone else would have. (my bet it would have been programmers from the Baltics or Scandinavia.)
Plus, everyone should be happy that Ebay is going to take it in the shorts from the ridiculous price they paid for Skype.
Skype has a backdoor for European and American intelligence agencies. It was revealed publicly before the company was sold.
You might be correct. I thought I had read that Skype had a backdoor on CNET News. I can not find an article on CNET or through Google that would support my claim.
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