[P1] OT: security issues with wifi (was: anyone know any good call by call dialup ISPs in California?)

[wes]

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On Monday, February 3, 2003, at 02:17 AM, Richard McKay wrote:

> Mike Beede wrote the following:
>
>> SSH on OS X offers 256-bit AES.  I found that in around two minutes.
>> Thanks for playing.
>
> It does make it considerably harder to crack with 256 but my point is 
> still
> valid that the powers that be can still (if they really want to and 
> spend
> enough time) decode anything the private individual can encode. They 
> will
> never release an encoding system to the public that they are not 
> capable of
> taking apart...

Sigh. AES (Rijndael) was selected through a public submission and 
review process supervised by NIST. The "powers that be" did not make 
any changes to the algorithms. The AES is a part of the best 
representation of the publicly available knowledge on symmetric 
ciphers. Do the "powers that be" have stronger ciphers? Probably. Can 
the "powers that be" "decode" AES-encrypted information? Highly 
*unlikely*. It's been shown that while the government crypto world in 
the past had more knowledge than the public crypto world, the public 
world has done a good job of developing new techniques for both 
cryptography and cryptanalysis. At this point I would not be willing to 
say that the government world knows significantly more than the public 
world in cryptanalysis.

To put this in perspective, I am also pretty paranoid. Paranoia is a 
good thing. But it helps to know what to be paranoid about and knowing 
the abilities of the "powers that be".

Just trying to inject a little reality into the discussion, not trying 
to turn this into a crypto discussion (which I almost did half a dozen 
times :)

- -- 
wes / wgriffin at jtan.com / 000f1a2f

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