What concerns me is that every single vocal defender of the security of bitcoin's algorithm viz the NSA uses fallacious arguments, in my opinion, including you.

The suggestion as per your comment here is that a lack of evidence against secp256k1 would imply strength or security in bit coin, but that is not true. It's like saying "Oh, you do not live in Antarctica therefore you do not know snow". Further, the fact that such weak arguments are so pervasive concerns me.

Most bitcoiners believe it would take billions of years to crack bitcoin. But the truth is that nobody is going to crack it by brute force.

I am not a cryptographer, but I recognize bullshit and a lot of the defense of bit coin against possible NSA meddling is frankly bullshit.

1) There is a lot of material online about the NSA supposedly introducing deliberately flawed algorithms. The most serious of that material has been held back, even by Snowden.

2) Bitcoin relies on sha2 which is basically an NSA algorithm. In fact sha1 was tweaked by the NSA for reasons it chooses to keep secret.

3) The founder of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamota, is an unknown. I understand that there is a cult feeling around him for some people but all of the facts on top of his anonymity should be cause for pause.

4) Another very popular algorithm has been documented to my satisfaction as having originated with the NSA.

What kind of control might they want?

I mean mostly could it be an NSA project?

A follow up from some other threads.

Curious about opinions.

Please no technical stuff like "x^17√31 proves such and such". It's too easy to bullshit with things others don't understand.

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=15531

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/16/cryptographers_attack_nsa_s_secret_effort_to_subvert_internet_security.html

I expected that answer.

My opinion is other than that.

One thing I have noticed again and again with regard to the integrity of bit coin crypto is a pattern of escalating deception.
Step one / Bit coin is secure because it would take trillions of trillions of years to break it. Once a person realizes that is nonsense they were shuffled to ...
step two / Hi, I am an authority in Cryptography and your concerns are nothing but conspiracy theory. The NSA has messed with software but they would not pollute actual crypto standards. So the media says otherwise > step three?

What is your opinion, derived from the thread you link to? Do you believe the thread points to bit coin being secure?

Incompetence is one way of looking at it.

I was driving a cab many years ago and a lady was in the cab with a kid about 5 or 10 years old. The kid said to his mother something like "mom you have a booger in your eye", and the mother started beating the kid. Not just mild hitting, she was pounding him and he was screaming. I didn't know whether to pull over and break it up, I did nothing.

I don't know much about that kid now. He would be in his 30s. I do know pretty surely he supports the NSA and any other agency without question. Some people are taught one direction, some another.

Incompetence might not be the best word.

Please refer back to the following


You are not interested in 'uncovering', you are interested in covering.

Here is a basic summary of most 911 conversation in america

person1 Have you done any reading about 911?

person2 No, the Jews did not do 911.

person1 Huh?

person2 Stop being anti semitic.

person3 Those anti Semites are starting fiction about the Jews and 911 again.

person4 When will they stop persecuting us?

person5 It is a conspiracy made by evil people.

person1 Where did all this sudden traffic come from?

**************


So because I was the second person to post on this thread and then you distorted the post now it is my thread?

I'm a reasonably educated American. I'm also Jewish and spoke directly with a lot of people who had direct experience with nazxiism, and I have also read books on the subject.

The truth is that most educated Americans do believe that some entity related to Jews, whether 'Jews in general' or Zionists' or whatever, were responsible for 911.

Americans have been conditioned to defend Jews in a very superficial way and it is a situation with many historical precedents.

A few days ago there was backlash from an article the FBI director wrote entitled "why I make all FBI agents visit the holocaust museum". Or was the article entitled "How I became FBI director"? Doesn't matter. Look at the reaction to the article and examine it, if you like.

http://www.informationweek.com/architecture/nsa-building-$8965-million-supercomputing-center/d/d-id/1097313

One percent of $896.5 million is roughly $9 million.

They have much more than that.

Do you know any people with even $9 million computers loaded with code breaking software?

The point is that the person defending the NSA was offering a false gift, a Trojan horse. Is the NSA secretly trying to help the public learn math? No. That is zero percent of their motive, though a few people may learn a little math by trying to break btc.

The premise of the thread is that 911 was orchestrated for the purpose of invading Afghanistan.

A peripheral issue is that many groups then tried to predictably profit from the event.

****

If you want to force the "jooz did 911" notion I'm happy to go there.

Most educated Americans, a vast majority, believe discreetly that neocons in the United States, along with a vague network of Zionists, were responsible for 911.

If you pick any well educated American and get him or her drunk enough they will admit it. But polls say most people aren't really sure.

Imagine that. Why would polls not be reflective of actual opinions? Maybe because of jackasses who terrorize people into lying about their opinions. It is people like you who created the Nazis in Germany and who are creating them in america.

The only people who take your position, blindly saying that there is no evidence of 'Israeli' involvement in 911 are either shills or utter morons. If you would like me to start presenting the evidence for Israeli involvement say so. At this point my opinion, and the evidence, support a transnational interest in invading Afghanistan has happened several times and in the two most recent cases heroin was the commodity that sparked the flame.

There are a lot of selling points for GMO foods but surviving transport is probably not a major one.

Refrigeration can make a fresh strawberry last a very long time.

Chemicals can make processed strawberries last longer than twinkies http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/twinkies.asp

Cheers.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backdoor-in-rsas-cryptography-a-technical-primer/

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291217.0

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/video/NSA-encryption-backdoor-How-likely-is-it

http://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoor/

...

I agree that it is good to promote learning, to motivate it.

But there are very few people, none in fact, who have even one percent of the computing power of the NSA.

Should we trust that they are 'benevolent' with their power? Look around the world and decide.

The NSA has a long history of providing the most secret material to dictators and oppressive regimes. A tiny miniscule fraction of its intelligence product is used legitimately to fight objective crime.

Before the dawn of the internet this was not a problem. Almost no Americans knew what was actually being done with the data they collected. Now though the internet has changed things.

It is not a question of 'rendering bit coin useless'. Obviously that would defeat any purpose behind having control of the algorithm.

Imagine a world where only one group of people knows exactly how much money you have and where you spend it.

Now imagine you are in a country with a military dictatorship supported by that group. Your family has been killed. Most of your friends have been killed. There is almost nothing left you can do. But you have enough bit coin to escape...

Many, many articles. Here are a few that are first on a search engine.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/11/nist_denies_that_the_nsa_weakened_its_encryption_standard/

http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/12/nsa-paid-security-company-adopt-weakened-encryption-standards

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/16/nsa-gchq-undermine-internet-security

http://rt.com/usa/rsa-nsa-deal-weaken-encryption-581/

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9BJ1C220131220?irpc=932

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24165-how-nsa-weakens-encryption-to-access-internet-traffic.html#.VTkzZKpMGns

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption

Sha is bullshit.

This is probably common knowledge in government cryptographic circles in various countries and may even be what motivated a Chinese national to create Litecoin shortly after bitcoin.

There seems to be overwhelming evidence that people at the NSA have deliberately weakened cryptography several times so that encrypted material would be available them.

Is there any question about this?

From the nytimes article above

"The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards..."

"And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world."

"“For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart... When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, “those not already briefed were gobsmacked!”

And that is really the milder stuff.

Any person can follow the links and research a bit and most people will come to the conclusion that the NSA is deliberately giving a defective product to the public so they can derive short term benefits.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time arguing this. My interest is in not losing the little that I have because of some overly ambitious jackass bureaucrats who have zero integrity. Why some people online seems to work so hard to cover the misconduct of crooked nsa vermin, anyone can speculate.

If someone wants to research the subject further here are the first few links that come up on a search. I have not read any of them yet.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/how-the-nsa-may-have-put-a-backdoor-in-rsas-cryptography-a-technical-primer/

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291217.0

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/video/NSA-encryption-backdoor-How-likely-is-it

http://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoor/

Now it is easy to predict that someone will again try to divert the discussion or distract attention from evidence that the NSA has subverted sha2

Something like 99.999% of people would disagree with you.

Microsoft is like a withered limb of the U.S. government.

All of the 'authorities' at that link are mainstream types specifically chosen because they are respected by mainstreamers.

There may be a few flatearthers mixed in but the majority are very conventional.

************


Otay Panky.

***************



Any person is welcome to look at the material and make their own decisions.

The article minus links.

Despite the fact that the website www.cryptobang.com is no longer on the web we have strong intentions for this information to spread further across the internet. Knowledge must be available to everyone. Neither NSA, nor CIA, nor any government must influence the information flow.

We sincerely hope and believe that the information will not just vanish from this website. We would like to extend our invitation to an open dialogue.

http://web.archive.org/web/20141106091836/http://www.cryptobang.com/2014/10/05/what-nsa-created-cryptonote-for/

A few months have gone by since Edward Snowden started telling the world about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of global communications. A mass hysteria that ensued in the wake of his revelations had brought a justified wrath by users on such high-tech giants as Facebook and Apple. There is a point of view that cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which has experienced sudden growth in terms of usage and value, is a project run by the US National Security Agency. It’s hard to believe but apparently NSA possesses groundbreaking capabilities in terms of obtaining any kind of information in any point in time. So the idea may not seem as farfetched as it sounds.

Given its alleged use in drug trafficking, money laundering, terrorist financing and other anti-social activities, a number of countries across the world strongly suggest against using or relying on the decentralized money. But where the underlying idea of cryptocurrencies comes from and who’s the true inventor of blockchain based coins? The first efforts at ecash algorithms started as far back as 1998 and not without funding from the US government. Also, Tor (software for enabling online anonymity) is a product of collaboration by NSA and DARPA intended initially for protecting government communications. It was sometime later that NSA begun tapping into traffic to and from the directory servers used by Tor to scoop up the IP addresses of people who visited it. Some experts suggest that Bitcoin was intended to be the same kind of Trojan horse that Tor had turned out to be. The two of them would have made a perfect combination of eavesdropping tools. But since the collapse of Silk Road (online market operated as a Tor hidden service) where Bitcoin has become the preferred payment method for much of the online underground, the ensuing arrests of its users became a clear evidence of blockchain analysis being a perfect tool for identifying Bitcoin wallet holders.

Some renowned cybercrime experts began to suspect the existence of backdoors in Bitcoin as far as 2012. For instance, Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir published their famous paper ‘Quantitative analysis of the full bitcoin transaction graph’ in 2012 causing quite a turmoil in the Bitcoin community. If we look at the charts from https://blockchain.info/ focusing on the time frame within which the paper got published we will see a rapid increase in number of transactions with transaction volume remaining unchanged i.e. the average size of a transaction became smaller. This can only indicate one thing; the users carrying out transactions with substantial amounts of bitcoins for questionable purposes became disillusioned with the currency and moved on to more sophisticated schemes that would allow them to avoid government agencies oversight. Meanwhile tech-savvy community members set about making new anonymous cryptocurrencies like AnonCoin or ZeroCash along with mixing services (sharedcoin and coinjoin).

Obviously NSA was able to grasp the repercussions of losing control over the digital currencies. To tighten grip over illicit financial flows they had to come up with an alternative to discredited Bitcoin. That is when CryptoNote enters the picture.

CryptoNote technology employs an extremely sophisticated cryptology that boggles the minds of everyone but the brightest scientist like Adam Back and Greg Maxwell. The founders of CN prefer to keep their names secret and that constitutes another mystery. Don’t they want recognition for their achievement? Or maybe they simply are not allowed to name themselves. After all, all the top notch cryptographers, to whom CN team could easily be attributed to, are either on the NSA watch list or have graduated from their IA programs.

Perhaps the name of the CN whitepaper author was supposed to tell us something. Nicolas van Saberhagen is a rare name that is hardly ever mentioned anywhere on the Internet. An attentive reader could pick out letters NSA in the name but that as well could be mere wishful thinking.

Having been completely mystified with CryptoNote and its first implementation Bytecoin, me and a few of my fellow researchers looked at the technical aspects of the CN technology and were able to identify a number of puzzling clues.

To begin with, a renowned cryptographer and mathematician Daniel J. Bernstein in his observation of elliptic curve, which is the core concept of the CN technology, states that signature generation algorithm should use a deterministic random (http://ed25519.cr.yp.to/ ). This method eliminates the dependency on random generation derived from external events. Also external libraries become unnecessary. But for some inexplicable reason, CryptoNote employs the same elliptic curve and matches it with nondeterministic random through the random_scalar function. random_scalar is used for signature generation within the code whereby the random function becomes linked with external libraries which in turn leads to possible vulnerabilities.

(http://ed25519.cr.yp.to/) Bernstein writes: “Foolproof session keys. Signatures are generated deterministically; key generation consumes new randomness but new signatures do not. This is not only a speed feature but also a security feature, directly relevant to the recent collapse of the Sony PlayStation 3 security system.” — The abovementioned clearly states the necessity of deterministic random; however CryptoNote opted in a potentially unsound scheme.

It’s been reported that one of the most frequently used randomization libraries Dual_EC_DRBG was implanted with a backdoor. This particular insight was provided by Edward Snowden. But whether there are more libraries with NSA implanted vulnerabilities remains unknown.

It is likely that CN developers deliberately neglected the Bernstein’s rationale in order to make the backdoor possible. By inferring malice aforethought on the CN developer’s part we may as well call them crooks. The vulnerability is exploited by allowing to whoever has the knowledge to recover users’ private keys thereby de-anonymizing them through ring signature and key image compromisation. Since the core user base of anonymous cryptocurrencies is likely to be individuals or entities aiming to hide, launder or transfer illicit funds, the abovementioned vulnerability may provide NSA with a tool to uncover their identities. According to some indisputable evidence, at least one CryptoNote based currency had been in circulation on deeb web before certain events made it go public. CryptoNote reappeared on Clearnet some time before Snowden’s shocking revelations got published in The Guardian newspaper. Exactly what use CryptoNote had been put to on deep web is not that hard to guess. Since NSA is able to tap into its network, the illicit transactions made with CN based currencies yielded all the necessary information on the parties involved.

According to Snowden’s disclosures, NSA has been purposely implanting backdoors in cryptographic protocols in order to gain access to users’ private data: link

We have also found one confounding detail about Keccak.

NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has selected Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 hash function competition: link

NIST is a long-standing partner of NSA and the chances are that Keccak has intentionally been made defective. Experts suggest that Keccak based systems are susceptible to NSA attacks: link

CryptoNote has adopted a significant part of its cryptography from Keccak. Moreover, every single candidate in SHA-3 hash function competition who made it to the final round (link) had been used as building blocks of CryptoNote hash function. What made us wonder is that Keccak was the last on that list. Now if you look at this chronologically, CryptoNote was officially announced in july 2012 and the competition winner became known in october of the same year which makes us assume that CN (or whoever controls it) somehow knew the results before they were even announced. And that may be seen as clear indication of NSA involvement in CN project.

The NSA goal, from a February 2012 document, as confirmed by Snowden, released on November 22, 2013, is to extract all data on “anyone, anytime, anywhere” by influencing (corrupting) the “global encryption market. – link

1996 NSA report surfaced, ‘predicting’ a crypto-cyber unit eerily close to Bitcoin (link) However, upon closer inspection it turns out that the crypto-cyber unit described by NSA is more akin to CryptoNote than Bitcoin. Section 2.3 (3 Untraceable Electronic Payments) outlines the necessity of using blind signatures in order to achieve anonymity. But this feature wasn’t implemented in Bitcoin. The CryptoNote technology, on the other hand, presupposes the use of ring signatures which are analogue of blind signatures in p2p currencies.

Besides, initially itcoin was supposed to maintain the egalitarian principle where 1 CPU = 1 Vote. As the user base grew it became obvious that Bitcoin could be mined with GPUs and ASICs that are capable of substantially higher hash power. Subsequent wide-scale proliferation of ASICs rendered NSA incapable of controlling the vast network of Bitcoin. CryptoNote, as opposed to Bitcoin, doesn’t give an edge to GPU mining therefore NSA can be in control of the network at any time. Moreover, NSA is capable of crashing any CN coin’s network at almost negligible cost.

We spent quite some time recovering all these pieces of data. Having weaved together enough technical proofs arguing in favor of NSA theory of CN origination we leave it up to you to make sense out of it. Meanwhile lets turn to more trivial things. For starters, there are scores of CN based coins but what purpose do they serve since there is hardly any service that accommodates them apart from exchanges? It’s very likely that these coins are being used on deep web chiefly for purchases of illegal articles. Another option would be money laundering and sponsoring of illicit activities. Bytecoin in that respect is the most likely candidate. It is by far the oldest CN based coin with proven track record of deep web exposure. Since CN coins are easily converted in fiat they can be put to any use imaginable, starting with financing the US-supported insurgency groups scattered across the world or even legalizing profits from international drug trade. One way or another, deep web is routinely monitored by NSA and it has been proved by multiple backdoors in Tor.

Whatever the case with CryptoNote, the Heartbleed bug that caused the disruption in the Tor network for several days along with loss of users private keys should not be forgotten. The possible involvement of NSA in creation of CN and collaboration with its developers leaves the door open for all sorts of security vulnerabilities. So if you are a CN user, be vigilant and keep track of your transactions, however secured and anonymous they are, because you never know who might be watching.