Hi,

Ideally, this exerpt is from the book Digital Fortress. I am happy to know that someone somewhere feel and thinks the way I do. I admit to having this idea but was not sure how to put it. And though it deals with encrytion and cracking of RSA/PGP/El-gamal/BFish/et al, and I thought it should be in the Crypto board, this discussion is not really a point for talking about how to crack it. So I have put it in the Off topic board. Maybe, if its not correct, the admins can shift it to crypto forum as they deem fit. Its long, but WORTH the read. And it wil make you THINK!

---------Begin the Document----------------
TRANSLTR, like all great technological advancements, had been a child of necessity. During the 1980s, the NSA witnessed a revolution in telecommunications that would change the world of intelligence reconnaissance forever--public access to the Internet. More specifically, the arrival of E-mail.
Criminals, terrorists, and spies had grown tired of having their phones tapped and immediately embraced this new means of global communication. E-mail had the security of conventional mail and the speed of the telephone. Since the transfers traveled through underground fiber-optic lines and were never transmitted into the airwaves, they were entirely intercept-proof--at least that was the perception.
In reality, intercepting E-mail as it zipped across the Internet was child's play for the NSA's techno-gurus. The Internet was not the new home computer revelation that most believed. It had been created by the Department of Defense three decades earlier--an enormous network of computers designed to provide secure government communication in the event of nuclear war. The eyes and ears of the NSA were old Internet pros. People conducting illegal business via E-mail quickly learned their secrets were not as private as they'd thought. The FBI, DEA, IRS, and other U.S. law enforcement agencies--aided by the NSA's staff of wily hackers--enjoyed a tidal wave of arrests and convictions.
Of course, when the computer users of the world found out the U.S. government had open access to their E-mail communications, a cry of outrage went up. Even pen pals, using E-mail for nothing more than recreational correspondence, found the lack of privacy unsettling. Across the globe, entrepreneurial programmers began working on a way to keep E-mail more secure. They quickly found one and public-key encryption was born.
Public-key encryption was a concept as simple as it was brilliant. It consisted of easy-to-use, home-computer software that scrambled personal E-mail messages in such a way that they were totally unreadable. A user could write a letter and run it through the encryption software, and the text would come out the other side looking like random nonsense--totally illegible--a code. Anyone intercepting the transmission found only an unreadable garble on the screen.

The only way to unscramble the message was to enter the sender's "pass-key"--a secret series of characters that functioned much like a PIN number at an automatic teller. The pass-keys were generally quite long and complex; they carried all the information necessary to instruct the encryption algorithm exactly what mathematical operations to follow tore-create the original message.
A user could now send E-mail in confidence. Even if the transmission was intercepted, only those who were given the key could ever decipher it.
The NSA felt the crunch immediately. The codes they were facing were no longer simple substitution ciphers crackable with pencil and graph paper--they were computer-generated hash functions that employed chaos theory and multiple symbolic alphabets to scramble messages into seemingly hopeless randomness.
At first, the pass-keys being used were short enough for the NSA's computers to "guess." If a desired pass-key had ten digits, a computer was programmed to try every possibility between 0000000000 and 9999999999. Sooner or later the computer hit the correct sequence. This method of trial-and-error guessing was known as "brute force attack." It was time-consuming but mathematically guaranteed to work.
As the world got wise to the power of brute-force code-breaking, the pass-keys started getting longer and longer. The computer time needed to "guess" the correct key grew from weeks to months and finally to years.
By the 1990s, pass-keys were over fifty characters long and employed the full 256-character ASCII alphabet of letters, numbers, and symbols. The number of different possibilities was in the neighborhood of 10120--ten with 120 zeros after it. Correctly guessing a pass-key was as mathematically unlikely as choosing the correct grain of sand from a three-mile beach. It was estimated that a successful brute-force attack on a standard sixty-four-bit key would take the NSA's fastest computer--the top-secret Cray/Josephson II--over nineteen years to break. By the time the computer guessed the key and broke the code, the contents of the message would be irrelevant.
Caught in a virtual intelligence blackout, the NSA passed a top-secret directive that was endorsed by the President of the United States. Buoyed by federal funds and a carte blanche to do whatever was necessary to solve the problem, the NSA set out to build the impossible: the world's first universal code-breaking machine.
Despite the opinion of many engineers that the newly proposed code-breaking computer was impossible to build, the NSA lived by its motto: Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.
Five years, half a million man-hours, and $1.9 billion later, the NSA proved it once again. The last of the three million, stamp-size processors was hand-soldered in place, the final internal programming was finished, and the ceramic shell was welded shut. TRANSLTR had been born.

Although the secret internal workings of TRANSLTR were the product of many minds and were not fully understood by any one individual, its basic principle was simple: Many hands make light work.
Its three million processors would all work in parallel--counting upward at blinding speed, trying every new permutation as they went. The hope was that even codes with unthinkably colossal pass-keys would not be safe from TRANSLTR's tenacity. This multibillion-dollar masterpiece would use the power of parallel processing as well as some highly classified advances in clear text assessment to guess pass-keys and break codes. It would derive its power not only from its staggering number of processors but also from new advances in quantum computing--an emerging technology that allowed information to be stored as quantum-mechanical states rather than solely as binary data.
The moment of truth came on a blustery Thursday morning in October. The first live test. Despite uncertainty about how fast the machine would be, there was one thing on which the engineers agreed--if the processors all functioned in parallel, TRANSLTR would be powerful. The question was how powerful.
The answer came twelve minutes later. There was a stunned silence from the handful in attendance when the printout sprang to life and delivered the cleartext--the broken code. TRANSLTR had just located a sixty-four-character key in a little over ten minutes, almost a million times faster than the two decades it would have taken the NSA's second-fastest computer.
Led by the deputy director of operations, Commander Trevor J. Strathmore, the NSA's Office of Production had triumphed. TRANSLTR was a success. In the interest of keeping their success a secret, Commander Strathmore immediately leaked information that the project had been a complete failure. All the activity in the Crypto wing was supposedly an attempt to salvage their $2 billion fiasco. Only the NSA elite knew the truth--TRANSLTR was cracking hundreds of codes every day.
With word on the street that computer-encrypted codes were entirely unbreakable--even by the all-powerful NSA--the secrets poured in. Drug lords, terrorists, and embezzlers alike--weary of having their cellular phone transmissions intercepted--were turning to the exciting new medium of encrypted E-mail for instantaneous global communications. Never again would they have to face a grand jury and hear their own voice rolling off tape, proof of some long-forgotten cellular phone conversation plucked from the air by an NSA satellite.
Intelligence gathering had never been easier. Codes intercepted by the NSA entered TRANSLTR as totally illegible ciphers and were spit out minutes later as perfectly readable cleartext. No more secrets.
To make their charade of incompetence complete, the NSA lobbied fiercely against all new computer encryption software, insisting it crippled them and made it impossible for lawmakers to catch and prosecute the criminals. Civil rights groups rejoiced, insisting the NSA shouldn't be reading their mail anyway. Encryption software kept rolling off the presses. The NSA had lost the battle--exactly as it had planned. The entire electronic global community had been fooled... or so it seemed.

-----------End of Document---------------------

And it seems very logical. Can the USA afford the release of PGP/Rij et al if they were uncrackable? Though this seems to be fiction, somewhere in the deepest recesses of some part of the world, some organization has ALREADY cracked these things.

Maybe FRAVIA, with his now new search related "secrets" can assist us in this? Aw....just kidding about it. I don't think he can also find that info. Wot?

Have Phun

Meh. It's a work of fiction. And Dan Brown isn't exactly a reliable source, anyway.

Personally, I doubt they can break RSA/PGP all that much faster than anyone else can, if it's implemented correctly, with a long enough key. I mean, let's say for the sake of argument that "TRANSLTR" actually existed. It was able to break 64-bit keys in 15 minutes. Okay -- woopdedoo. It would have to be 2^1984 faster - a 1 with nearly 600 zeros after it faster - to break a 2048-bit key. I don't care how many billions you have to throw at the project, you aren't going to get that kind of speed increase in a decade.

Of course, if they really utilized quantum computing, it would all be moot. You could break pretty much any length of code in the same amount of time. Which is, I guess, what Brown was trying to dream up. But honestly, I don't think that's a realistic possibility, either. If you follow the history of computing technology and cryptography in the military and private sector during the 20th century, that just doesn't seem very realistic. Wheter it's collusus, eniac, Turing's bombes, asymetric cryptography, etc., the governments have gotten there first, but not by much. They probably never been more than 10 years ahead of the private sector, at best. And often probably not even quite that much. A lot of the military systems are contracted out to private companies anyway - specific information might not leak out to the private sector, but the ideas behind the technology, physics, and mathematics, do. Ultimately, I just don't think we're that close to having a primitive quantum computer. But hey, I could be wrong.

And the NSA did fight to keep asymetric cryptography out of the public arena, but really once Zimmerman released PGP into the wild, it would have just been closing the barn door after the cows ran out.

I thought the US kept a bunch of autistic kids locked up somewhere cracking those codes day and night.

82, 82, 82

Hum. The NSA arready had 17 acres of supercomputers operational. No reason not to add "one" more.

Regards,

How do you "weld" ceramic?

These guys really can do anything!

SiGiNT

Howdy,

First of all, I am not saying this NSA crypto cracker computer is not real.

When reading such story's, be it NSA or area 51 or white sands etc;
you must consider the source. Did you find other source's that can back up the original story with different information ??
Are these sources credible ??

Now consider this, If it were true, how would the NSA allow such a thing to become public ?? After all, this is their BIG SECRET.
If we all knew that this was true we would just change our encryption/algo shit and the NSA would have to start all over again.
And I dont mean adding another 16 bit's to the equation.
Lets change it too something silly like 32768 bit.

So lets say this NSA mega monster computer does exist.
If there is a big lie, it will be that they can process 32768 bits in the same 10 minutes.
They would never reveal the exact power their rig really has.
The last part of all of this "what if", Do they really care about people swapping code snippets ???

They have enough problems with Sept 11.
You remember, the old "so when did you know..." shit

If they knew, they would not be trying to cover up the weakness in the system.
Maybe they really were to busy analizing emails about code to realize the USA was about to attacked.

I must stop. I know too much

Woodmann

One of the problems with intercepts is that there are TOO DAMN MANY of them to carefully check them all. One of the things used is filtering programs to look for certain "key" words and then the message is flagged for review by a "next level" of overview.

Regards,

Catch 22: To find the key words, you have to decode all the cyphers. If you know which ones to decode, you don't need no key words.
After 28 days and 1.2 million dollars invested in cracking a 2048 bit encoded E-mail they find out it reads:
Osama had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. . .

wait, this is old news. Isn't this the same black box Martin Bishop's group found in Sneakers??

I dont know about nsa but you are forgetting england and mi5
i have seen a multi cpu spidernet computeing machine many processors running in parralel that work on a totally diffrent sytem then the x086 structure it needs special sw to run below windows to emulate the x086 cpu
this was 5 years ago and it was real in fron of my eyes and this was only a small english company probably worth 1 - 2 million if u had billions involved it gets crazy i think its time for some real programmers to make multi - parralel - double encrytion sw that allows you to encryt 4 -5 times over and relase free on net to show those big brothers what we can do

That post almost made sense.

To move the topic slightly, does anyone have an idea of the currently-available power of distributed processing (like the SETI project, I'm specifically referring to end-users downloading idle-processing tools) and the impact of, say, turning the entire SETI project to brute forcing some "strong" encryption?

"Good afternoon SETI users, we have a credible terrorist threat but need to break this encrypted file to understand the terrorist plans. Unfortunately Jack Bauer is currently unavailable, so you don't mind if we just hijack your tool for a day or so, do you?".

Hey, it could happen.

Just as many have already said, the concept is fundamentally flawed. No matter how many 'stamp-sized processors' you 'hand-solder', you're only going to increase your processing time linearly, or at best in polynomial time. The complexity of these cyphers, however, is an exponential function of the base of your encryption key. If I recall a result from my Number Theory course correctly, even simple RSA encryption can be cracked no faster than 2^n, whereas modular exponentiation allows the same cyphertext to be legitimately decrypted (by one who knows the private key) in no time. Add to this the fact that some pretty huge primes (or probable primes) are available with a simple Google search, and Brown's story becomes pretty implausible.

Besides, he makes out that the NSA had 'no idea' how effective the computer would be. Why would they go as far as completing the construction of this thing without taking the hour or two (at most) that it would take to obtain an accurate estimate to its efficacy?