Topic: Has the NSA already broken bitcoin? - page 17. (Read 50498 times)

Correct me if I'm wrong and misread sometime off one of news sites, but I understood that the NSA was able to intercept, then index all transmissions prior to the encryption process. To me, this made perfect sense when I read it, for then it wouldn't matter what SHA(?) is used, the information would already be mirrored and stored, somehow allowing the NSA to act as the man-in-the-middle.

A) No need to be vulgar B) it is reason to double check that our implementation of SHA-256 is secure. There could be ways that different secure SHA-256 systems could become vulnerable, like for example- I'm now tempted to think Androids Random Number problem might have been deliberate. It exposed private keys, but maybe it's exposed so much more that the NSA has found valuable.

This is an excellent idea! You go first.

Remember. This website is not safe.

Bitcoin probably is.


Just check the certificate in address bar:
The issuer:
CN = GeoTrust Global CA
O = GeoTrust Inc.
C = US


Oh US... I wonder if NSA has the keys...

The web security isn't really a hard thing to crack. You have handful of authorities and if you get to them whole chain unravels... There is points of weakness and USA government has access to those...

If someone (NSA, or anyone else) did break the encryption used by Bitcoin, or other cryptocurrencies, that would be all the more reason to switch to Primecoin!

+1 for https://prism-break.org/

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/52931694#.Uik20azLcpk

The NSA has bypassed or altogether cracked much of the digital encryption used by businesses and everyday Web users, according to reports in The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and the nonprofit news website ProPublica. The reports describe how the NSA invested billions of dollars since 2000 to make nearly everyone's secrets available for government consumption.

In doing so, the NSA built powerful supercomputers to break encryption codes and partnered with unnamed technology companies to insert "back doors" into their software, the reports said. Such a practice would give the government access to users' digital information before it was encrypted and sent over the Internet.

"Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it," Snowden said.

I do not believe that NSA has broken Bitcoin, but watch out for your other leaks.

Start here.
https://prism-break.org/

Settle down guys.
The NSA is not trying to take down bitcoins.
There are already bitcoin businesses that pay taxes, geesh.

One powerful common sense argument: if academic pursuit is not a powerful enough motivator to find algorithmic exploits or mathematical work-arounds, then the political class's fear of losing control of the most powerful social control mechanism should be more than enough to concentrate minds to the task. What would be the motive for such a convoluted action as developing and seeding a cryptographically governed peer-to-peer money network, with the explicit intention of destroying it at a future date? To make the destruction coincide with other planned earth shaking events, in the belief that it would help to drive home the sense of despair at as many stratifications of society as possible? Don't buy that, there's too much effort and too little benefit, as well as too much risk to the religion that is the modern consumerist monetary system. As it stands, the overall Bitcoin protocol and network is a massive threat to the status quo, there would have to be a plan to change so many aspects of it's mechanics in such quick succession, that I can't see how it makes any sense to introduce Bitcoin for publicly condemning an innovative concept or as an intermediate device to invoke some other deception. The coincidence of it's introduction is curious though, that Satoshi just so happened to be inspired with the right combinations of concepts by the 2007 economic crisis, and that he was already well enough informed about the history and importance of world currencies that he wanted his identity concealed. And that he successfully retained his hidden identity, despite all number of clues he could have littered the web with when he was innocently checking out the CypherPunks newsgroup, or looking at DigiCash and HashCash. This train of thought leads me to a conclusion I have often considered; that Satoshi is a non-US state asset, that the whole Bitcoin project is a genuine attempt by some well intentioned state to jam a spanner in the works of this whole Western governmental world domination agenda. The pieces fit in many ways, but also not in many others, the chief example being the lack of substantive action by the targets in such a scenario. The US and the EU states, as well as their various disparate puppets throughout the rest of the world, could have taken more decisive action by now, if nothing more than out of sheer diabolical desperation. Like much these days, the facts just don't quite fit the connecting story. Watch this space, I guess. All I know for sure is, we are somewhere approximating the right vantage point to see world changing events unfold.

Remember this is still a government organization.

Yes, they have tons of funding. Do you think the DMV would improve if it suddenly received mountains of funding? Probably not. Most of the government work that requires a brain is contracted out in some way. It's not like the government is capable of attracting talented, intelligent people any other way.

If a private group or academia hasn't found a way to break it yet the NSA definitely hasn't.

Highly highly HIGHLY unlikely that anyone has broken Bitcoin's algorithm. I would never say its impossible because the "impossible" has been achieved in the past, but I doubt you will ever see this impossible.

They may not however SHA-2 has been in a use a long time and a vulnerability would leave financial and communication systems in a country vulnerable.  It would be highly risky for say the UK intelligence community to discover a flaw and then not warn UK companies. If agents for one state can discover the flaw so can another.  It would be like someone building a fortress out of TNT because they believe only they know it is explosive.  To my knowledge no governmental agency (or non-governmental entity) has published any warning about the security of SHA-2 even without disclosing a specific flaw/weakness.

It really isn't accurate to compare encryption in WWII (a niche application over a small period of time with no non-military usage) to SHA-2 (one of if not the most widely deployed algorithms in the world used over an extended period of time in pretty much every aspect of the global economy).  Wouldn't you agree?

Why would the NSA or any other intelligence agency reveal that it had cracked/compromised an encryption technology? Wouldn't they keep it a secret as long as possible, to collect as much damaging information as possible, just as the allies did in WWII?

If SHA2 is broken or ECDSA is broken, Satoshi Dice will go broke overnight, as well as all other casinos that re use addresses.

And almost all Provably Fair gaming will be rigged to death.

Those will be our warning signs.

Of course, if the NSA is smart, they would do this slowly ... ...

I stand corrected.

Carefully.

Imagine a scenario where current addresses are compromised.  The more likely scenario is some flaw is found which makes ECDSA "weakened".  As long as your public key is unknown you are immune.   Developers could come up with a new address type.  We will call existing addresses type 1 and the new stronger ones type 2.  Future clients would support both address types (backwards but not forwards compatibility).  Yes this would be a hard fork scenario but given the backwards compatibility it wouldn't be very controversial. 

You would need to transfer (spend) your coins from a type 1 address to a type 2 address and that tx could potentially be at risk.  A lot depends on how "broken" type 1 addresses are.  If on average it takes a high end hashing farm weeks to break a single private key well your funds would be "safe" long before the key could be compromised.   However lets assume a highly unlikely scenario where type 1 addresses can be broken quickly and cheaply once the public key is known.  Even then we are talking about a race condition so unless the attacker also had a significant fraction of the network they wouldn't be able to double spend successfully. 

However lets assume that is also true.  Pretty much a worst case scenario.  If your public key is already know you are SOL.  If it isn't you would need to make a "covert" transaction to a stronger address.  One option would be to mine it yourself, another option would be to send the "upgrade" tx securely directly to a mining pool you trust.  This could even be offered as a value added service by a pool (say 1% fee).  If you didn't mine it yourself you would need to trust the pool but you wouldn't need to trust the entire network.

How would you spend the coins though?

I'm reading this book right now. Pretty on topic. In this novel the NSA can decrypt any algorithm except one...

It is time for bitcoin to move to 512 bit. Or switch to Scrypt (plz baby jesus, no).

You are confusing quantum encryption (or quantum key sharing) with post-quantum cryptography. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

PQC are algorithms which are resistant to attack using quantum algorithms.  The major problem with these is they tend to have very large key and signature sizes.  Conservatively it would mean a 10x to 100x increase in bandwidth, and storage for Bitcoin.