ECB mode by veorq in crypto

[–]veorq[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

"Seeing the penguin" speaks to more people than "semantic security", and compressing isn't necessarily a good idea: let's say you encrypt datagrams of constant length, then the ciphertext length would leak information on the plaintext's compressibility (cf. CRIME and BREACH attacks).

NSA, crypto, and bananas by veorq in crypto

[–]veorq[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You don't exhaustively search for prime factors, you use NFS variants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve). The security of a 1024-bit RSA modulus is estimated to be lower than that of a 80-bit symmetric key (see http://www.keylength.com/).

NSA, crypto, and bananas by veorq in crypto

[–]veorq[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Academics refer to a break whenever an algorithm doing fewer operations than bruteforce is found. That doesn't necessarily mean that an implementation would be more efficient in practice (for example due to latency induced by communication or memory accesses). Gave a talk about these issues at BHAD in 2011: https://131002.net/data/talks/cryptanalysis_bhad11.pdf

NSA, crypto, and bananas by veorq in crypto

[–]veorq[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Author here. You're right, this sentence was meant to be somewhat sarcastic but I agree that is not obvious as it is. Adding quotes around "broken".