It only takes a few minutes to reflash your BIOS. Maybe you leave it unattended in your locked hotel room. You’re safe because your hard drive is encrypted, right? Or the local police take it out of your sight for a few minutes. So you are going through customs with your encrypted laptop, they take it away for a few minutes to examin it. If I remember correctly, many laptops are assembled with blank ROMs, and the BIOS is programmed with a JTAG like interface on one of the external ports. If you can get access to the computer in question a short time while the computer is powered down, you can reflash the BIOS using a USB drive or CD rom. Billed as an anti-theft feature that allows software persistance when the hard drive is formatted and Windows is reloaded, this is ideal for accessing encrypted drives when you do not know the key. This interesting bit of code allows OEM’s to install an executable file in the BIOS, which Windows will read and execute upon startup. Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft has introduced the Windows Platform Binary Table. And true to form, Microsoft has come through with flying colors. What to do? Well… let’s just ask our friends at Microsoft for some help. This can be a problem for LEA’s, right? They can’t read the disk or inject malware by booting from another device, it’s encrypted. Imagine you have fully encrypted your disk with Truecrypt, Veracrypt, or even Bitlocker while disabling your Microsoft OneDrive account. It’s interesting listening to the TLA’s complain about going dark because of things like full disk encryption, but apparently they are not going down without a fight. Unfortunately, the growth of elliptic curve use has bumped up against the fact of continued progress in the research on quantum computing, necessitating a re-evaluation of our cryptographic strategy. We look forward to your continued support as we work together to improve information security for National Security customers against the threat of a quantum computer being developed. For those partners and vendors that have not yet made the transition to Suite B algorithms, we recommend not making a significant expenditure to do so at this point but instead to prepare for the upcoming quantum resistant algorithm transition.įor those vendors and partners that have already transitioned to Suite B, we recognize that this took a great deal of effort on your part, and we thank you for your efforts. Until this new suite is developed and products are available implementing the quantum resistant suite, we will rely on current algorithms. We are working with partners across the USG, vendors, and standards bodies to ensure there is a clear plan for getting a new suite of algorithms that are developed in an open and transparent manner that will form the foundation of our next Suite of cryptographic algorithms. Our ultimate goal is to provide cost effective security against a potential quantum computer. Based on experience in deploying Suite B, we have determined to start planning and communicating early about the upcoming transition to quantum resistant algorithms. IAD recognizes that there will be a move, in the not distant future, to a quantum resistant algorithm suite. NSA Preparing Quantum Resistant Encryption Algorithms I take that to mean the NSA can crack a 90 bit key.Ī challenge to that statement was made by a very experienced attendee, who stated that she questions whether a 256 bit key is adequate, and that her experience is that a 90 bit key is just ridiculous. There is no reason to have a key longer than 90 bits. So, when a spec indicates up to a certain level but not above, that means it has vulnerabilities.Īt the same workshop, during a panel discussion that included that same NSA person, during a discussion key lengths, he said: The subject was quickly changed then the workshop continued. He paused a moment, gave me a funny look, then asked one of his colleagues about it (no answer). Does that mean that it is not to be used for higher classifications? NIST specifies that AES can be used up to Top Secret. The NSA has stopped recommending P-256, AES-128, 2048-bit RSA/DH and SHA256.Īt the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Workshop a few weeks back, during a break, I asked an attendee from the NSA the following:
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