[pffft8888]

The propaganda against encryption is in full swing.

My expectation is that all NSA CNSA[1] encryption standards are backdoored at the implementation level (by the NSA who uses Suite A for its own communication and I suspect military communications outside of that in weapons systems that can fall into enemy hands)

I guess the propaganda is driven by FBI and law enforcement agencies.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_National_Security_A... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_A_Cryptography

[aziaziazi]

Can someone explain me why this is downvoted ? In my understanding his proposition about NSA is quite close to a popular one and hn seems to allow discussion of hypothesis - if they are more probable than imaginary ?

Is it the word propaganda that patriots dislike ? Not sure if some soviet connotation is involved in US but for me it’s just a synonym of “public lobbying” of “ideology gov marketing”.

I know those subjects can become polemic and I don’t want to throwing oil on the fire, but an “out of debate” clarification would be nice and helpful.

[pffft8888]

The worst thing about HN (and it does reflect badly on YC as a whole, at least for me) is how they enable people to act in seemingly passive aggressive ways. Instead of stating disagreements, they downvote, and you'll never know why. Just pure crappy behavior. In this case, someone explained below that they downvoted because they don't agree that the article is propaganda and that it calls for less backdoors or something like that as if everything isn't backdoored already, one way or another.

Then you have stuff like BIP39 protecting people's money (cryptocurrency) that can be cracked for $350/hr on GPU rigs. Someone even wrote a how-to.

Current security makes it harder, but not sufficiently harder, to break into systems. I mean... HN crowd is probably high schoolers and non-tech people just out here to argue.

[nl]

It's because it's another conspiracy theory unsupported by evidence.

The encryption algorithms in CNSA are broadly accepted by the security community. Just saying "NSA backdoor" is a cheap shot.

[jmclnx]

It was an interesting read, moral to me is not to use Cell Phones for anything illegal. If you do not control the keys, you might as well not bother with encryption.

[mschuster91]

Even if you control the keys, it does not protect you from vulnerabilities somewhere in the stack. Stuff like thumbnail generation provided by the OS has been used by cyber-criminals in the past to compromise phones by sending MMSes or even third-party messenger apps, and I'd take a guess and bet that at least the Five Eyes government agencies all have a sizeable cache of baseband vulnerabilities.

Technology simply has become far too complex to be reasonably secure, even if you have the financial firepower of being Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or Amazon.

[_kbh_]

> My expectation is that all NSA CNSA[1] encryption standards are backdoored at the implementation level (by the NSA who uses Suite A for its own communication and I suspect military communications outside of that in weapons systems that can fall into enemy hands)

CNSA / NSA Suite B are pretty much entirely public encryption standards that have stood up to public scrutiny for decades at this point.

They are also approved by the USA to encrypt TS SCI information, why would they approve that if they had backdoors?.

[pffft8888]

Why would they have Suite A then?

[wmf]

This article isn't spreading any propaganda against encryption. If anything, it makes the case that new backdoors are not needed.