

Kryptos & Overestimating the CIA - MikeCapone
http://michaelgr.com/2008/12/29/overestimating-the-cia/

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pmjordan
The British seem to hold a similar respect for GCHQ (which is probably more
like the NSA than the CIA) - there seems to be a widespread belief that they
can crack even strong, modern encryption. (I doubt it, but nobody really seems
to know anything about GCHQ - the grandfather of a UK friend of mine
apparently worked there and the family only found this out after his death)

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brl
I really doubt that intelligence agencies such as the NSA and GCHQ have any
secret and powerful ways to break cryptography at all.

I know that everybody thinks that they do, but where is the evidence for this?
Even during the 60s and 70s when they had a near monopoly on cryptographic
research there is no indication that they made any unique and spectacular
breakthroughs.

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pmjordan
I know little about cryptanalysis and the mathematics behind cryptographic
ciphers, so I can't comment much on that. But I doubt they'd break widely-used
ciphers and continue to allow the military and executive to use them. Once
broken, they would have to fear that the method would leak or be independently
recreated by someone else. Everyone still uses RSA, D-H, AES and Blow/twofish
though, as far as I know.

And I find it unlikely that they've developed and built special hardware to
brute-force these algorithms and nobody knows about it.

