Gmail: Encryption is now mandatory

Four years after Google turned on HTTPS by default in Gmail, and less than a year since the Edward Snowden document leaks, Google removes your ability to opt out of encryption.

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NSA wants to make a quantum computer that cracks tough encryption

While the NSA can inflitrate many secure systems without breaking a sweat, there are still some encryption methods that it just can't crack. That may not be a problem in the long term, however. The Washington Post has published documents from Edward Snowden which reveal that the agency is researching a "cryptologically useful" quantum computer. The dramatically more powerful hardware could theoretically decode public encryption quickly enough to be useful for national defense; conventional PCs can take years, even when clustered together. That kind of decrypting power is potentially scary, but you won't need to worry about the privacy of your secure content just yet. It's not clear that the NSA is anywhere close to reaching its goal, and any success could eventually be thwarted by quantum-based encryption that's impossible to break by its very nature. Still, the leak is a friendly reminder that we shouldn't take existing security methods for granted.

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Source: Washington Post

Tags: eavesdropping, edwardsnowden, encryption, internet, networking, nsa, privacy, quantum, quantumcomputing, security, surveillance Next: Researchers turn to Twitter in the search for time travelers .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

View the Original article

NSA wants to make a quantum computer that cracks tough encryption

While the NSA can inflitrate many secure systems without breaking a sweat, there are still some encryption methods that it just can't crack. That may not be a problem in the long term, however. The Washington Post has published documents from Edward Snowden which reveal that the agency is researching a "cryptologically useful" quantum computer. The dramatically more powerful hardware could theoretically decode public encryption quickly enough to be useful for national defense; conventional PCs can take years, even when clustered together. That kind of decrypting power is potentially scary, but you won't need to worry about the privacy of your secure content just yet. It's not clear that the NSA is anywhere close to reaching its goal, and any success could eventually be thwarted by quantum-based encryption that's impossible to break by its very nature. Still, the leak is a friendly reminder that we shouldn't take existing security methods for granted.

SOURCE: Washington Post

Report: NSA Trying To Build A Quantum Computer To Crack Encryption

The National Security Agency wants to build a futuristic super computer that can break most types of encryption, according to documents obtained from Edward Snowden by the Washington Post. No reason to worry yet, however, as the Agency is not even close to figuring out how to build the space-age technology necessary to crack most security procedures.

According to the documents, the computer project is part of a $79.7 million research program, “Penetrating Hard Targets”, suspected to be under classified contracts in a lab in College Park, Maryland.

Encryption, has, since at least the Ancient Greeks, been a method of scrambling information with the noise of arbitrary character strings; only someone with a rubric could determine what is the noise and what is the message. The more noise, or bits, the more difficult it is to crack the code by trial and error. A 1,024-bit encryption could take years (or much longer) to decode.

Quantum mechanics exploits the rather unintuitive concept that matter can exist in multiple states. Quantum computers could calculate problems where bits are both a 1 and 0, or multiple 1s and 0s, potentially increasing the speed of calculations exponentially.

Potentially then, the NSA could build a computer that could decode the most advanced encryption much faster.

Generally speaking, allowing even one organization to have the capability to break encryption is potentially threatening to all security on the web. Though, advances in quantum computing could also have benefits to science and health. So, at this point, the benefits and harms are pretty theoretical.

Either way, according to The Washington Post, such computers are extremely fragile and the NSA is close to only a few of the basic building blocks. “That’s a great step, but it’s a pretty small step on the road to building a large-scale quantum computer,” explained MIT mechanical engineer, Lloyd Seth.

This is why the NSA is also pressuring and paying security experts to create backdoors and exploits.

Read The Post’s full story here.

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NSA Reportedly Paid A Security Firm Millions To Ship Deliberately Flawed Encryption Technology

Today Reuters reported that the NSA paid RSA, a security company and subsidiary of EMC, $10 million to use a flawed random generator technology as the “preferred” option in its BSafe software, increasing its popularity.

In September of this year, the New York Times reported that the NSA was working to, in its own words, “break widely used Internet encryption technologies.” That the NSA wanted to get past encryption was not surprising.

How far along it was, however, came as a shock. An NSA memo was blunt in its assessment of its own progress: “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”

After being implicated in the NSA’s efforts to get around encryption, RSA told its customers that they should stop using the flawed algorithm. As the Wall Street Journal reported at that time, the warning was “one of the first instances of a security company acknowledging the U.S. government may have been involved in propping open a backdoor into a product.”

Reuters’ revelation that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to use the flawed algorithm changes the discussion. Instead of the NSA being some sort of evil mastermind, bent on making popular security standards obsolete, it was instead buying its way into companies.

And for small sums to boot. Who wants to wager that this is the only time the NSA paid a security company to use flawed code that it prefers so that it can better beat back encryption?

And if it can get a company with as long a history as RSA to bend so far to its quarter for a mere ten million dollars, the NSA could have bought any sort of access and influence that it wanted.

Depressing, but probably true.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

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Enterprise Social Network Convo Adds At-Rest Encryption To Its Servers To Better Protect Client Data

Convo, an enterprise social network that competes with the now Microsoft-owned Yammer, today announced that it has added at-rest encryption (ARE) to its servers in order to better protect its client information.

Recent revelations relating to the National Security Administration (NSA) have taught the technology community and world at large that data isn’t safe from surveillance, and other forms of snooping. One NSA program, MUSCULAR, became infamous for tapping communication links between American companies’ data centers abroad.

The Washington Post reported that the NSA has “secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers” abroad, and that by “tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans.”

In response, Google and others are working to encrypt the data that flows between their vast server installations. Microsoft, for example, went as far as calling the NSA and others of its ilk “advanced persistent threat

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