7 ms·

Was drinking in a bar in Espoo in 2012 or 2013 and heard this from someone at rovio. At the time they used Riak db and basho were onsite and we asked why they

Was drinking in a bar in Espoo in 2012 or 2013 and heard this from someone at rovio. At the time they used Riak db and basho were onsite and we asked why they didn't enable inter server encryption. "Because nsa pay us 10m not to". Guess nsa pulled the Riak cluster protocol off the aws fibre.

fiatpandas 1y ago
I’m actually comforted by the fact that NSA needed encryption turned off to spy.
- danielheath 1y ago
  Or it was simply cheaper than cracking it.
  - hx8 1y ago
    I was comforted by the idea that it is more expensive than $10m to crack encryption, but this was in 2013.
    - greenavocado 1y ago
      Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.35 billion cubic kilometers of water. To raise this entire volume from an average temperature of 3.5C to boiling (100 C), we'd need roughly: 1.35 x 10^21 kg x 4,184 J/(kg C) x 96.5C is approximately 5.45 x 10^25 joules That's 545 million exajoules or about 10,000 times humanity's annual energy consumption. If you tried to brute-force AES-256 with conventional computers, you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys. Even with a billion billion (10^18) attempts per second: 2^256 operations / 10^18 operations/second is approximately 10^59 seconds. You'd need about 2.7 x 10^41 universe lifetimes to crack AES-256 At about 10 watts per computer, this would require approximately 10^60 joules, or roughly 2 x 10^34 times the energy needed to boil the oceans. You could boil the oceans, refill them, and repeat this process 200 trillion trillion trillion times. For RSA-2048, the best classical algorithms would need about 2^112 operations. This would still require around 10^27 joules, or about 20 times what's needed to boil the oceans. ECC with a 256-bit key would need roughly 2^128 operations to crack, requiring approximately 10^31 joules It's enough to boil the oceans about 2,000 times over. Quantum computers could theoretically use Shor's algorithm to break RSA and ECC much faster. But to break RSA-2048, we'd need a fault-tolerant quantum computer with millions of qubits. Current quantum computers have fewer than 1,000 stable qubits. Even with quantum computing, the energy requirements would still be astronomical. Perhaps enough to boil all the oceans once or twice, rather than thousands of times.
      - gosub100 1y ago
        > you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys it's very unlikely you'd have to check the entire keyspace before you found it. On average it would be about half.
        greenavocado 1y ago
        Is there a more efficient way? What's the state of the art?
        bb88 1y ago
        If you can find a quantum computing solution it's at worst O(sqrt(n)). There still seems to be a time factor, if not energy factor to computation. Shor's algorithm for factoring prime numbers is at best O(log(n)^2 * log(log(n)))
        timschmidt 1y ago
        IDK, let's ask a mathematician. Oh, they all work for NSA.
        aaronbrethorst 1y ago
        Womp womp. https://therecord.media/nsa-to-cut-up-to-2000-roles-downsizing https://therecord.media/nsa-to-cut-up-to-2000-roles-downsizi...
        timschmidt 1y ago
        I like to tell myself that everyone at NSA is a fine upstanding patriot, and that the agency only ever does what is in the best interest of the American People, but that does feel naive at times. Like when they infiltrate international standards bodies to introduce backdoors. Is downsizing the NSA something we're upset about?
        akimbostrawman 1y ago
    - nullc 1y ago
      Wrong assumption. Lets imagine they could costslessly crack the encryption there. But as soon as they use any information gathered that way they risk leaking that they have this incredibly valuable capability. ... valuable and very fragile since people can easily change encryption schemes. Better to pay every party you need to to have boring vulnerabilities and security shortcomings, so that any information leak doesn't need a capabilities revealing explanation. So I think this gives you no information on their capabilities beyond bribing commercial players, which isn't exactly new. In the past (and presumably now) our intelligence apparatus has outright owned crypto/security companies in order to distribute backdoored technology. And of course they have, they're not prohibited, it's highly effective, they'd be incompetent not to.
      - bb88 1y ago
        But knowing still gives you an advantage, even if you can't use it legally -- because you can still use it illegally. LEO and Prosecutors will use "parallel construction" to construct a narrative about how information was obtained in a legal way even though it was clearly obtained illegally. Or you could choose to only act on 5% (e.g.) of the information gleaned -- and that which could clearly be shown to be leaked by a third party. Or say if you were tapping the information of a mob boss, you could leak the information to a competitor and let justice work it's way through the streets instead of the courts.
        nullc 1y ago
        It's tricky, because you run the risk that any use risks disclosing the capability. Targets can even set traps. E.g. I caught irc opers spying on PMs by sending trap URLs where I secretly could see the access logs. Because great care was taken to make sure the URLs existed nowhere else when they got loaded it was a confirmation that the traffic was monitored. Now perhaps a somewhat safer tool is to just use the cracking to determine the best targets to bribe or backdoor, but only allow the group with the cracking power to give the names of services to monitor at any cost.
        bb88 1y ago
- emmelaich 1y ago
  You could leak the private key accidentally on purpose but that would be harder to plausibly deny involvement if that fact leaked.
- deafpolygon 1y ago
  I'm reminded of a certain XKCD comic[1]. The US government probably doesn't need to crack the encryption to get what they want. [1]: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- starspangled 1y ago
  On the other hand it would be a very cheap counter espionage measure if a small stream of such payments was enough to convince China et al that the NSA had not broken encryption.
xori 1y ago
"How do you get corporate secrets out of a software engineer? Sit them next to another engineer on a plane."
- frollogaston 1y ago
  It's elegant. The other person can spill amazing secrets, but there's no way to prove it, so nobody will believe you second-hand.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bb88 1y ago
10M sounds like a nice executive bonus. I'm not saying it's a bribe -- I would never, ever do that.
arealaccount 1y ago
Why wouldn’t they just give them DB access for the 10m? Id assume NSA would prefer the database to remain encrypted and have an admin account?
- radicaldreamer 1y ago
  Deniability
  - dylan604 1y ago
    Plausible. You can always deny anything. It just might not be so plausible under scrutiny.
  - bb88 1y ago
    If you're the NSA, you can tell Amazon, "Hey here's $1B. You're going to get some fiber outages, and we're also going to buy a bunch of compute from you at an exorbitantly high price you'll charge us. It's fine, we're the NSA. So when the outages happen, don't announce it. Also terrorism."
CrossVR 1y ago
I once asked a VP of engineering at a major ISP why they don't add a layer of encryption to their peering and customer connections to prevent spy agencies from tapping their fibre cables. I was expecting him to say it would be too expensive to upgrade all their network hardware given the amount of traffic. Instead he said: "our routers can already do that, but the government regulator stepped in and prevented us from turning it on."
rdtsc 1y ago
That's pretty wild. Was it an "investment" of some sort, and then the CEO got a hint with a wink, that there is more where it came from if they don't enable any encryption. Anyone from Rovio who got less than $10m in their pocket willing to tell us a story?
adeon 1y ago
Is there any reliable source for NSA paying Rovio other than this random bar discussion? Not that I don't believe you or that I'm naive about NSA and the power of money, but I looked around news in 2014 and the accusations against Rovio specifically are a bit different flavor. It seems that Rovio was oversharing data to ad networks (Millennial Media comes up a lot), and NSA likely slurped data from the advertising companies. This bar banter is suggesting that NSA had some kind of arrangement with Rovio directly instead, and Rovio willingly went along. Or alternatively, do you feel the Rovio employee's blabbering was talking about an actual, real NSA deal with Rovio, or was it more like a bar joke and direct NSA co-operation was not really implied? (e.g. "we know our security is bad, but these ad companies pay us $XX million to not use encryption so it's sorta like NSA pays us to keep it that way sips beer"). I'm interested, because if that is an actual thing that happened, then that's an example of NSA paying a Finnish company $$$ to weaken their security, and the Finnish company willingly agreeing to that. Is it in NSA's Modus Operandi to approach and then pay foreign companies to do this sort of thing? Your comment is describing it in few words, but to me it sounds like it maybe wasn't implying an actual NSA direct co-operation, more like someone doing bar banter and being entirely serious. But that's just me trying to guess tone. (I'm Finnish. I want to know if Rovio has skeletons in their closet. So I can roast them.)
- leftcenterright 1y ago
  from an intelligence perspective, this is business as usual. - Rovio sold data to ad companies (ad companies primarily based in the US) - They used AWS (to which of course NSA has legal access) - Data is not end to end encrypted, all metadata sits on servers in plain text and within AWS even moves from server to server in plain text How much insight metadata can grant to someone like NSA is still wildly underrated. - https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-birds-and-other-apps-for-personal-data https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-...
  - adeon 1y ago
    Ah yeah, I saw the propublica as well, it was one of the first articles I found when looking on the topic. I don't doubt at all that Angry Birds data was used by NSA, doesn't seem controversial. The specific question I am interested in is: Did Rovio knowingly and willingly accept $$$ from NSA (directly or indirectly) to weaken their security? I.e. were they acting as a willing accomplice. Because that part would be unusual for Finland (well, at least as far as I know). For US companies I wouldn't bat an eye at news like this.

fiatpandas 1y ago

I’m actually comforted by the fact that NSA needed encryption turned off to spy.

danielheath 1y ago
Or it was simply cheaper than cracking it.
- hx8 1y ago
  I was comforted by the idea that it is more expensive than $10m to crack encryption, but this was in 2013.
  - greenavocado 1y ago
    Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.35 billion cubic kilometers of water. To raise this entire volume from an average temperature of 3.5C to boiling (100 C), we'd need roughly: 1.35 x 10^21 kg x 4,184 J/(kg C) x 96.5C is approximately 5.45 x 10^25 joules That's 545 million exajoules or about 10,000 times humanity's annual energy consumption. If you tried to brute-force AES-256 with conventional computers, you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys. Even with a billion billion (10^18) attempts per second: 2^256 operations / 10^18 operations/second is approximately 10^59 seconds. You'd need about 2.7 x 10^41 universe lifetimes to crack AES-256 At about 10 watts per computer, this would require approximately 10^60 joules, or roughly 2 x 10^34 times the energy needed to boil the oceans. You could boil the oceans, refill them, and repeat this process 200 trillion trillion trillion times. For RSA-2048, the best classical algorithms would need about 2^112 operations. This would still require around 10^27 joules, or about 20 times what's needed to boil the oceans. ECC with a 256-bit key would need roughly 2^128 operations to crack, requiring approximately 10^31 joules It's enough to boil the oceans about 2,000 times over. Quantum computers could theoretically use Shor's algorithm to break RSA and ECC much faster. But to break RSA-2048, we'd need a fault-tolerant quantum computer with millions of qubits. Current quantum computers have fewer than 1,000 stable qubits. Even with quantum computing, the energy requirements would still be astronomical. Perhaps enough to boil all the oceans once or twice, rather than thousands of times.
    - gosub100 1y ago
      > you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys it's very unlikely you'd have to check the entire keyspace before you found it. On average it would be about half.
      - greenavocado 1y ago
        Is there a more efficient way? What's the state of the art?
        bb88 1y ago
        If you can find a quantum computing solution it's at worst O(sqrt(n)). There still seems to be a time factor, if not energy factor to computation. Shor's algorithm for factoring prime numbers is at best O(log(n)^2 * log(log(n)))
        timschmidt 1y ago
        IDK, let's ask a mathematician. Oh, they all work for NSA.
        aaronbrethorst 1y ago
        Womp womp. https://therecord.media/nsa-to-cut-up-to-2000-roles-downsizing https://therecord.media/nsa-to-cut-up-to-2000-roles-downsizi...
        timschmidt 1y ago
        I like to tell myself that everyone at NSA is a fine upstanding patriot, and that the agency only ever does what is in the best interest of the American People, but that does feel naive at times. Like when they infiltrate international standards bodies to introduce backdoors. Is downsizing the NSA something we're upset about?
        akimbostrawman 1y ago
  - nullc 1y ago
    Wrong assumption. Lets imagine they could costslessly crack the encryption there. But as soon as they use any information gathered that way they risk leaking that they have this incredibly valuable capability. ... valuable and very fragile since people can easily change encryption schemes. Better to pay every party you need to to have boring vulnerabilities and security shortcomings, so that any information leak doesn't need a capabilities revealing explanation. So I think this gives you no information on their capabilities beyond bribing commercial players, which isn't exactly new. In the past (and presumably now) our intelligence apparatus has outright owned crypto/security companies in order to distribute backdoored technology. And of course they have, they're not prohibited, it's highly effective, they'd be incompetent not to.
    - bb88 1y ago
      But knowing still gives you an advantage, even if you can't use it legally -- because you can still use it illegally. LEO and Prosecutors will use "parallel construction" to construct a narrative about how information was obtained in a legal way even though it was clearly obtained illegally. Or you could choose to only act on 5% (e.g.) of the information gleaned -- and that which could clearly be shown to be leaked by a third party. Or say if you were tapping the information of a mob boss, you could leak the information to a competitor and let justice work it's way through the streets instead of the courts.
      - nullc 1y ago
        It's tricky, because you run the risk that any use risks disclosing the capability. Targets can even set traps. E.g. I caught irc opers spying on PMs by sending trap URLs where I secretly could see the access logs. Because great care was taken to make sure the URLs existed nowhere else when they got loaded it was a confirmation that the traffic was monitored. Now perhaps a somewhat safer tool is to just use the cracking to determine the best targets to bribe or backdoor, but only allow the group with the cracking power to give the names of services to monitor at any cost.
        bb88 1y ago
emmelaich 1y ago
You could leak the private key accidentally on purpose but that would be harder to plausibly deny involvement if that fact leaked.
deafpolygon 1y ago
I'm reminded of a certain XKCD comic[1]. The US government probably doesn't need to crack the encryption to get what they want. [1]: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
starspangled 1y ago
On the other hand it would be a very cheap counter espionage measure if a small stream of such payments was enough to convince China et al that the NSA had not broken encryption.

xori 1y ago

"How do you get corporate secrets out of a software engineer? Sit them next to another engineer on a plane."

frollogaston 1y ago
It's elegant. The other person can spill amazing secrets, but there's no way to prove it, so nobody will believe you second-hand.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

bb88 1y ago

10M sounds like a nice executive bonus. I'm not saying it's a bribe -- I would never, ever do that.

arealaccount 1y ago

Why wouldn’t they just give them DB access for the 10m? Id assume NSA would prefer the database to remain encrypted and have an admin account?

radicaldreamer 1y ago
Deniability
- dylan604 1y ago
  Plausible. You can always deny anything. It just might not be so plausible under scrutiny.
- bb88 1y ago
  If you're the NSA, you can tell Amazon, "Hey here's $1B. You're going to get some fiber outages, and we're also going to buy a bunch of compute from you at an exorbitantly high price you'll charge us. It's fine, we're the NSA. So when the outages happen, don't announce it. Also terrorism."

CrossVR 1y ago

I once asked a VP of engineering at a major ISP why they don't add a layer of encryption to their peering and customer connections to prevent spy agencies from tapping their fibre cables. I was expecting him to say it would be too expensive to upgrade all their network hardware given the amount of traffic. Instead he said: "our routers can already do that, but the government regulator stepped in and prevented us from turning it on."

rdtsc 1y ago

That's pretty wild. Was it an "investment" of some sort, and then the CEO got a hint with a wink, that there is more where it came from if they don't enable any encryption. Anyone from Rovio who got less than $10m in their pocket willing to tell us a story?

adeon 1y ago

Is there any reliable source for NSA paying Rovio other than this random bar discussion? Not that I don't believe you or that I'm naive about NSA and the power of money, but I looked around news in 2014 and the accusations against Rovio specifically are a bit different flavor. It seems that Rovio was oversharing data to ad networks (Millennial Media comes up a lot), and NSA likely slurped data from the advertising companies. This bar banter is suggesting that NSA had some kind of arrangement with Rovio directly instead, and Rovio willingly went along. Or alternatively, do you feel the Rovio employee's blabbering was talking about an actual, real NSA deal with Rovio, or was it more like a bar joke and direct NSA co-operation was not really implied? (e.g. "we know our security is bad, but these ad companies pay us $XX million to not use encryption so it's sorta like NSA pays us to keep it that way sips beer"). I'm interested, because if that is an actual thing that happened, then that's an example of NSA paying a Finnish company $$$ to weaken their security, and the Finnish company willingly agreeing to that. Is it in NSA's Modus Operandi to approach and then pay foreign companies to do this sort of thing? Your comment is describing it in few words, but to me it sounds like it maybe wasn't implying an actual NSA direct co-operation, more like someone doing bar banter and being entirely serious. But that's just me trying to guess tone. (I'm Finnish. I want to know if Rovio has skeletons in their closet. So I can roast them.)

leftcenterright 1y ago
from an intelligence perspective, this is business as usual. - Rovio sold data to ad companies (ad companies primarily based in the US) - They used AWS (to which of course NSA has legal access) - Data is not end to end encrypted, all metadata sits on servers in plain text and within AWS even moves from server to server in plain text How much insight metadata can grant to someone like NSA is still wildly underrated. - https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-birds-and-other-apps-for-personal-data https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-...
- adeon 1y ago
  Ah yeah, I saw the propublica as well, it was one of the first articles I found when looking on the topic. I don't doubt at all that Angry Birds data was used by NSA, doesn't seem controversial. The specific question I am interested in is: Did Rovio knowingly and willingly accept $$$ from NSA (directly or indirectly) to weaken their security? I.e. were they acting as a willing accomplice. Because that part would be unusual for Finland (well, at least as far as I know). For US companies I wouldn't bat an eye at news like this.