This is important

How is NSA breaking so much crypto?
OCTOBER 14, 2015
BY ALEX HALDERMAN AND NADIA HENINGER

There have been rumors for years that the NSA can decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted Internet traffic. In 2012, James Bamford published an article quoting anonymous former NSA officials stating that the agency had achieved a “computing breakthrough” that gave them “the ability to crack current public encryption.” The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand.

However, the documents do not explain how these breakthroughs work, and speculation about possible backdoors or broken algorithms has been rampant in the technical community. Yesterday at ACM CCS, one of the leading security research venues, we and twelve coauthors presented a paper that we think solves this technical mystery.

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off to talk with convention organisers

Off today to talk to a couple of convention organisers about music tracks and music programming. Hopefully I won’t talk myself hoarse, and hopefully this will result in more little geek music festivals around Seattle!

See, I may be handing off nwcMUSIC to new people this year – which still feels weird, I feel like I should be going to meetings and planning that show now – but I’m more than willing to talk. I’ll dump off all the data, institutional knowledge, and know-how that I’ve got to anyone planning an event if I can. There’s lots of room for more of these things.

Maybe I should do a series of knowledge-dump blog posts. It’d be nice to have all this online someplace so people could find it.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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