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2011-12-11 Syria-Lebanon-Iran

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Posted by Fred 2011-12-11 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11132 views ] Top
File under: Govt of Iran

#1 if there is encrypted data, the cryptosystem was designed by the CSS side of NSA, so Iran is officially blowing smoke at this point.

Posted by OldSpook 2011-12-11 01:48|| 2011-12-11 01:48|| Front Page Top

#2 They may be telling the truth, especially now that Obummer has given them one.

Posted by gorb 2011-12-11 02:19|| 2011-12-11 02:19|| Front Page Top

#3 If they're blowing smoke then it's impressive smoke. After all, they DO have the drone but couldn't possibly have the means to capture it and take control of it in flight, right?

At the start of WWII the Japanese pilots were all believed to be short-sighted and to wear glasses. Their airplanes were all thought to be obsolete biplanes. Those beliefs were soon shattered.

Big mistake to underestimate a potential enemy even in the smallest detail.

Posted by Canuckistan sniper 2011-12-11 02:20|| 2011-12-11 02:20|| Front Page Top

#4 I'd be looking more for a spy at the base that flew it...

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2011-12-11 04:51|| 2011-12-11 04:51|| Front Page Top

#5 'Iran has means to decrypt drone data'

Yea, they're called Dr Ivanov & Dr Chen.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2011-12-11 06:52|| 2011-12-11 06:52|| Front Page Top

#6 What happened to the questioning whether the drone was real?

Posted by trailing wife 2011-12-11 09:07|| 2011-12-11 09:07|| Front Page Top

#7 Hey Trailing Wife, I think the US gov admitted it lost the drone last week although I wonder why they have the bottom of it covered up so tightly.

Another question I have is what ever happened to spy satellites and what can drones do that they cannot other then move locations quicker.

Posted by Yosemite Sam 2011-12-11 09:43|| 2011-12-11 09:43|| Front Page Top

#8 Y.S.:"Another question I have is what ever happened to spy satellites and what can drones do that they cannot other then move locations quicker."
Not only can they move to a given location quicker than satellites, but they are: 1) not predictable in their travel (orbits) and 2)can loiter over any given area, whereas sats are constantly moving.
Downside is, they are move vunerable to being shot down/lost/given to the bad guys.
Too bad our Waffler-in-Chief has a teminal case of testicular atrophy in decision making (as in sending in the means to destroy it, or get it back)......

Posted by USN, Ret. 2011-12-11 10:19|| 2011-12-11 10:19|| Front Page Top

#9 Canuckistan, you (and a few others) obvious don't know jack about cryptography. Mathematically speaking, NP Hard is NP Hard, and there's no way around it. Basically the Iranians are saying they have found a magic decoder that exceeded even the best the Soviet Union and its successors have ever fielded. As to the "shoot down", that's pretty obvious is was a control failure, not a cryptographic one. Right now, even NSA likely doesn't have a way of breaking some open source systems that use long enough keys and proper key management. Things like Diffie Helman public key systems of 2048 bits or better for key exchange, then sufficiently large stream cypher keys of sufficient bitsize, really not all that large. Such systems basically become the functional and mathematical equivalent of one-time-pads (which are unbreakable except by brute force).

To put it into simple language: breaking a modern 1st world cryptosystem with the available electronics and cryptanalysis tools now available would take more time than is left in the life of the universe.

That's why you go after the humans, not the gear (which the Israelis, KGB, GRU and its successors did - steal the data before its encoded or after its decoded).

Posted by OldSpook 2011-12-11 17:25|| 2011-12-11 17:25|| Front Page Top

#10 For a starting point about NP-Hard and computational problems, see this link as NIST.gov

Posted by OldSpook 2011-12-11 17:27|| 2011-12-11 17:27|| Front Page Top

#11 Even the most secure pipe leaks at both ends.

And if the drone has the key stored in its software or hardware? Hopefully the keys are unique for each drone.

Posted by gorb 2011-12-11 17:30|| 2011-12-11 17:30|| Front Page Top

#12 Let me simplify this a bit more: to be able to break the NSA/CSS cryptosystems, the Iranians would have to have done the equivalent of proving a change to the fundamental nature of mathematics and computability - I'm taking earth shattering stuff in terms of the history of mathematics, the equivalent of Einstein and Newton rolled into one.

Posted by OldSpook 2011-12-11 17:32|| 2011-12-11 17:32|| Front Page Top

#13 Gorb the keys are not in hardware. Think about this: DirecTV has been delivering cryptocards for nearly 2 decades, and streaming very very rewarding perfect digital copies of movies for nearly 2 decades. The best Chinese Irish and European hackers have been going after this for the same amount of time. Thee newest cards are made so that they cannot be seen except with scanning elecontr microscopes, and if an SEM is used, the circuit will fuse due to parts of the matrix being tuned to absorb and destroy the circuit traces in the chip. Adi Shamir (the "S" or RSA fame) designed their cryptosystem.

And that's 2 decades old, commercial system. Do you really think that for such a sensitive piece of gear the NSA/CSS would allow anything even less? No, it would be considerably better.

The strength is in the algorithm, not in the chips, protected by the fundamental laws of mathematics. They biggest vulnerability of these systems is simply denial of service (jamming), not decryption. The next biggest vulnerability is the "rubber hose" (beat the code clerk with a rubber hose until he gives you the keys).

This isn't about racist stereotyping - its fundamental number theory, basic mathematical truths that are, for all practical purposes, immutable.

Posted by OldSpook 2011-12-11 17:39|| 2011-12-11 17:39|| Front Page Top

#14 Bottom line is, mathematically speaking, the Iranians are claiming the equivalent of having invalidated Einstein's E=MC^2 and claim they can now prevent nuclear fission and fusion. Its rubbish, absent a glaring weakness in the electronics.

Posted by OldSpook 2011-12-11 17:42|| 2011-12-11 17:42|| Front Page Top

#15 What happened to the questioning whether the drone was real?

What would be the point of sending up a fake (ruse) drone and landing it in Iran?

Posted by Durnham Freebody 2011-12-11 17:47|| 2011-12-11 17:47|| Front Page Top

#16 What would be the point of sending up a fake (ruse) drone and landing it in Iran?

When you put it that way, it does sound kind of silly, Durnham. The discussions I saw said the thing the Iranians were showing looked like a kit model rather than the real thing. I'm honestly not qualified to judge such things, so I have to trust those who are.

Posted by trailing wife 2011-12-11 18:49|| 2011-12-11 18:49|| Front Page Top

#17 Most codes are cracked through the content.

I'd say the vulnerability of a drone is that it is constantly transmitting its location, height, etc.

Know where it is, and you can potentially crack the encryption.

Posted by phil_b 2011-12-11 19:05|| 2011-12-11 19:05|| Front Page Top

#18 What would be the point of sending up a fake (ruse) drone and landing it in Iran?

Stuxnet 2.0?

Posted by manversgwtw 2011-12-11 19:29|| 2011-12-11 19:29|| Front Page Top

#19 Sounds like the algorithm isn't as important as the key. Good enough for me. Thanks, OS. :-)

Posted by gorb 2011-12-11 20:55|| 2011-12-11 20:55|| Front Page Top

#20 Phil_b - Content doesn't matter (That's called a "chosen plaintext" attack, and any cryptosystem worth its salt can resist that well known attack method). You're still thinking in terms of "classical cryptanalysis", which is something I learned a long time ago, but which is also obsolete in this age of strong crypto, starting with Public Key crypto and Diffie Hellman, and many strong block and chain cypher systems that are now out there in the public domain. We are not talking 2 3 or 6 times hard - we are talking multiple orders of magnitude jumps in difficulty with each new algorithm and computing power. And remember it far less computationally intensive (by order of magnitude) to encrypt than it is to decrypt.

To quote cruptology historian David Khan: Many are the cryptosystems offered by the hundreds of commercial vendors today that cannot be broken by any known methods of cryptanalysis. Indeed, in such systems even a chosen plaintext attack, in which a selected plaintext is matched against its ciphertext, cannot yield the key that unlock[s] other messages.

When building a cryptosystem, a basic starting point normally assumes that, for the purposes of analysis, the general algorithm is known; this is Kerckhoffs' principle of "the enemy knows the system". They also assume that the enemy will have full acess to large amounts of cyphertext (encrypted data), and may even have some reasonble inference that the cyphertext includes known sequences (For example, a NATO date-time group as part of an encrypted message header).

I can hand you the content, the encryption engine and algorithm to a modern cryptosystem, and absent the keys you will not be able to decrypt the encrypted data. And you may even have the keys themselves stored on that device - but they would be time sensitive, and exchanged via public key cryptography. That would mean that even having the public key that encrypted the data will do you no good in decrypting it - only the private key at the other end can decrypt it) you will NOT be able to break it. Period. Its the math. Until and unless we have a huge breakthrough in factoring integers, or a mathematical change in the foundation of fundamental number theory, modern cryptographic systems are, simply put, unbreakable.

That's why the US went over to DF, traffic analysis and HUMINT -- SIGINT is not the panacea it was back when the Navy broke the purple code. We can likely no longer read the bad guys mail (or email in this case).

And in this specific case the Iranians are flat out lying about their ability to extract encrypted data and decrypt it.

Posted by OldSpook 2011-12-11 23:08|| 2011-12-11 23:08|| Front Page Top

#21 More Drone news ...

* INDIAN DEFENCE FORUM > IRAN'S BOASTS OVER DOWNED DRONE REVEAL INCONSISTENCIES, in both Iranian + US accounts of the particular incident espec how it came to be in Iran's physical possession.

* DEFENCE FORUM INDIA [Related] > [AFP] IRAN'S EMPTY US DRONE BOASTS: VARIOUS INCONSISTENCIES HAVE APPEARED IN IRANIAN + US ACCOUNTS OF THE US DRONE THAT WAS "SHOT DOWN" BY IRAN.

* SAME > [Interfax.RU = translation] RUSSIA + CHINA HAVE ASKED IRAN FOR ACCESS TO DOWNED US DRONES.

* RUSSIA TODAY > [Video] IRAN SHOWS INTERCEPTED DRONE UNSCATHED.

Posted by JosephMendiola 2011-12-11 23:36|| 2011-12-11 23:36|| Front Page Top

23:43 JosephMendiola
23:36 JosephMendiola
23:25 JosephMendiola
23:08 OldSpook
22:56 Grease Jith3343
22:49 Grease Jith3343
22:31 Dale
22:24 Dale
22:06 abu do you love
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21:54 JosephMendiola
21:42 Hellfish
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20:55 gorb
20:09 Dale
19:55 JosephMendiola
19:46 JosephMendiola
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19:29 manversgwtw
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19:13 Lone Ranger
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