From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 09:51:07 +0800
To: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Subject: Re: NSA says strong crypto to china??
In-Reply-To: <199601091649.LAA11718@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960109115034.27854B-100000@eskimo.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> Once SIGINT becomes much harder regardless of their previous attempts
> to stop it, I suspect that the NSA will become a friend and not an
> impediment. By that time, of course, the "we have to protect our
> people" types will be the only ones producing results and getting
> funding, and the "we have to gather information" types will have long
> ceased to produce. Thats probably a decade or more off, though.

I doubt this will ever happen.  If strong cryptography is ever deployed
worldwide ubiquitously, which is a big if, passive ether sniffing becomes
much harder, but the SIGINT people will likely switch to active attacks. 
Defense against active attacks is much more difficult than against passive
attacks, and requires a host of technologies besides strong crypto (the
one we're lacking most, I think, is a good software engineering
methodology).  I bet the NSA is doing active research on sniffer viruses
and other automated tools for large scale active attacks. 

Wei Dai