> You would assume the versions of anything the NSA uses is significantly modified or different than the versions in public.
That's not something that I assume.
When I think about things like the Debian PRNG bug (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number...) I wonder if i) it was somehow planted by the NSA or ii) They knew about it, and fixed it in any internal uses, but didn't tell the world.
> You can assume that anything you have in your hands is either completely insecure or only trivially secure in comparison to anything the NSA has.
I'm not sure this makes much sense. You can probably trust the math, as far as we do trust the math. And that is "We don't yet know of any feasible attacks on this." Implementations of that math into algorithms and then code and then software on machines with real world users - well, yes, there are a whole slew of things that can go wrong and I guess NSA / GCHQ are aware of many of these and enjoy spotting the flaws in the wild.
Having said all that, if a person is worried about well funded government agencies coming after them then some crypto isn't much of a barrier. Even if the crypto is secure 'they' will find some way to get the information.
> these guys [allegedly] have the best cryptographers, mathematicians and programmers in the world on their payroll.
> But then Ellis came across a paper buried in the GCHQ's mountain of secret material. Written by an anonymous author, it described a project conceived by Bell Telephone toward the end of World War II. The scheme, labeled Project C43, was an ingenious method of analog voice scrambling that worked by the use of distortion.
To give some context to this, GCHQ have only just released some work by Turing, nearly 60 years after his death. Normal secrets are kept for 30 years. Thus, GCHQ's mountain of secret material is likely to contain some delicious nuggets.
That's not something that I assume.
When I think about things like the Debian PRNG bug (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number...) I wonder if i) it was somehow planted by the NSA or ii) They knew about it, and fixed it in any internal uses, but didn't tell the world.
> You can assume that anything you have in your hands is either completely insecure or only trivially secure in comparison to anything the NSA has.
I'm not sure this makes much sense. You can probably trust the math, as far as we do trust the math. And that is "We don't yet know of any feasible attacks on this." Implementations of that math into algorithms and then code and then software on machines with real world users - well, yes, there are a whole slew of things that can go wrong and I guess NSA / GCHQ are aware of many of these and enjoy spotting the flaws in the wild.
Having said all that, if a person is worried about well funded government agencies coming after them then some crypto isn't much of a barrier. Even if the crypto is secure 'they' will find some way to get the information.
> these guys [allegedly] have the best cryptographers, mathematicians and programmers in the world on their payroll.
An anecdote to finish: Rivest Shamir and Adleman 'invented RSA' in 1977. It had been independently invented several years earlier, by Clifford Cocks. But he (although influenced by other people) did so alone. In his head. And had to remember it overnight. He wasn't in the office (GCHQ) at the time, and so wasn't allowed to write it down. (http://www.gchq-careers.co.uk/about-gchq/history/asymmetric-...) (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/crypto_pr.html) (http://www.zdnet.com/gchq-pioneers-on-birth-of-public-key-cr...) (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-1147510...)
The Wired article says
> But then Ellis came across a paper buried in the GCHQ's mountain of secret material. Written by an anonymous author, it described a project conceived by Bell Telephone toward the end of World War II. The scheme, labeled Project C43, was an ingenious method of analog voice scrambling that worked by the use of distortion.
To give some context to this, GCHQ have only just released some work by Turing, nearly 60 years after his death. Normal secrets are kept for 30 years. Thus, GCHQ's mountain of secret material is likely to contain some delicious nuggets.