HN Explorer

How much more advanced is government technology?

7 points by shutter ↗ HN
After seeing Quantum of Solace, I was reminded of a question I've wondered about for some time: How much more advanced are governments' technology (specifically the US) than tech that civilians have?

This comes up in a number of areas:

- Encryption / Ability to Decrypt stuff

- Computational Power (supercomputers)

- Satellite and GPS granularity

- Real-time surveillance and wiretapping

I've always found encryption and all that interesting, but there's always the question of whether or not the government can decrypt communications, etc. In my case, practicality has won out for the time being -- I don't worry about my generally-benign e-mails and other files stored in the cloud for instance, and the tedious nature of typing passwords each time I step to my PC, and to access my data, has yet to trump my perceived need for encryption and security.

I would think that if the government had some secret supercomputer capable of decrypting strongly-encrypted files, that technology would be publicly known. But with the stuff in movies about super-advanced tech, it's not an unreasonable thing to wonder about.

How much farther ahead is government tech than civilians? Are the dazzling displays of tech in spy movies purely fantasy, or is there some element of truth to the government's secret and/or superior technical knowledge or resource?

6 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] thread
cperciva
Pay attention when public researchers say "if I had enough money, I think I could...", and you'll probably get a good sense of what the more advanced government agencies have access to.

As far as encryption goes, I'd say that AES-128 is probably safe from offline decryption by the NSA right now, but I wouldn't trust it to be secure ten years from now, or to be secure against active attack right now. I doubt the NSA can find pre-images for SHA256, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had found collisions. I doubt the NSA can factor 2048-bit semiprimes, but I'd be shocked if they couldn't factor 1024-bit semiprimes.

Herring
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack

128 bit AES is rather out of anyone's reach

cperciva
Correction: 128-bit AES is out of the reach of a brute force attack.

The NSA doesn't do brute force.

Herring
AES is approved by the NSA for top secret information. If they had found a way to crack it, don't you think there would have been a contest to replace AES like there was with DES?

They're not that far ahead any more.

http://www.schneier.com/essay-064.html

cperciva
AES is approved by the NSA for top secret information

Correction: AES192 and AES256 are approved by the NSA as a component in an approved implementation. AES128 is specifically NOT permitted for use with top secret information.

They're not that far ahead any more.

Schneier is probably right; the NSA is probably a few years ahead technologically instead of two decades ahead. However, they still have a very large budget.

Herring
Rijndael was selected in 2001 after a 5-year selection process. I assume AES128 was never allowed from the beginning; the alternative would leak too much information. We still think AES128 must be brute forced. So what's the chance that today they're over a decade ahead?