[Soma]

(10-03-2013 12:18 AM)theArbiter Wrote:  

I just wanted to clarify a bit of cryptography here. If your encryption system is virtually sound, then any data you sent can't be decrypted except by the person who possesses the private key.

Agreed in theory, however the big point is if in practice. Of course, the NSA can't crack RSA or Diffie-Hellman in general. However, its not inconceivable that with their processing power they are able to factor, say, 2048-bit RSA keys. More importantly, the Snowden revelations showed us that the NSA has placed backdoors in adopted cryptographic standards. From the NYT article:

NYT Wrote:

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort "a challenge in finesse."

theArbiter Wrote:

No one can get around that. Not me, not the FBI, not Aliens.

Well, if P=NP...

theArbiter Wrote:

It's just that your post gave me the impression that it is potentially impossible that Tor protect your anonymity. I'm not saying that it does, but it's not impossible: if things are done right (which is not at all a trivial task), then you could end up with a secure system. It's mathematics. I've studied cryptography before, so I'm not talking out of my ass.

Tor has a well-known susceptibility to man-in-the-middle attacks. Further, as mentioned above, the Tor network only has a few thousand relays in the world and, since anyone can set one up, and further, since the most well-known service to use the network was just shut down, it is conceivable that many of them are compromised.

And I've also studied cryptography.