NSA: few tools still resist to the agency’s technical … – ZDNet France

interception capabilities now known as decryption and made available to the NSA are almost unlimited, remains to define which protocols and what technologies today still resist efforts by the US agency. The latest documents published by Spiegel help to know a little more about Fort Meade capabilities. Although they date from 2012, they are among the Recent provided by Edward Snowden and provide insight into what few tools still escape the clutches of the NSA.

 
 And they finally few: as noted in the Spiegel publishing documents originally submitted by Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum at a conference at the Chaos Communication Congress, only a handful of tools can now be estimated to Protect from NSA. The Pretty Good Privacy algorithm developed by Phil Zimmermann in 1991 is thus part, if it is implemented correctly. Truecrypt, Tor, Tails and OTR protocol also pose problems for analysts to the US agency and documents published by the Spiegel report several failures of the NSA deal with these tools. The most problematic for the NSA still users who use more of these conjugated how tools.
 
 

For the rest, the NSA’s task is much easier. HTTPS for example, which enables secure web connection does not seem to pose a problem to the agency, which had set the goal in 2012 to intercept and decrypt HTTPS 10 million a day. Another technique controlled by the NSA spying VPN, widely used in enterprise technology to secure a connection to an external server. These solutions are usually based on IPSec or PPTP protocols pose quite a few problems with the NSA, which has a fully dedicated to the interception and espionage connections protected by VPN unit.
 

 Despite the progress of the NSA, the agency still considers that the popularization of encryption tools is the main threat today on continuing operations. The documents consulted by the Spiegel detail the efforts made by the NSA to weaken cryptographic standards now stretch out to secure exchanges on the Internet: the daily reports and the NSA agents are frequently asked to participate in the Internet Engineering conferences Task Force. Besides gathering information, NSA benefit from this access to influence decisions taken within the entity. Spiegel publishes an excerpt from the document recalling that these changes to the commercial encryption software and tools must remain secret.