In early December 2016, Adam was doing what he’s always doing, somewhere between hobby and profession: looking for things that are on the internet that shouldn’t be. That week, he came across a server inside New York University’s famed Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing, headed by the brilliant Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory. The server appeared to be an internet-connected backup drive. But instead of being filled with family photos and spreadsheets, this drive held confidential information on an advanced code-breaking machine that had never before been described in public. Dozens of documents spanning hundreds of pages detailed the project, a joint supercomputing initiative administered by NYU, the Department of Defense, and IBM. And they were available for the entire world to download.
The supercomputer described in the trove, “WindsorGreen,” was a system designed to excel at the sort of complex mathematics that underlies encryption, the technology that keeps data private, and almost certainly intended for use by the Defense Department’s signals intelligence wing, the National Security Agency. WindsorGreen was the successor to another password-cracking machine used by the NSA, “WindsorBlue,” which was also documented in the material leaked from NYU and which had been previously described in the Norwegian press thanks to a document provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Both systems were intended for use by the Pentagon and a select few other Western governments, including Canada and Norway.
Adam, an American digital security researcher, requested that his real name not be published out of fear of losing his day job. Although he deals constantly with digital carelessness, Adam was nonetheless stunned by what NYU had made available to the world. “The fact that this software, these spec sheets, and all the manuals to go with it were sitting out in the open for anyone to copy is just simply mind blowing,” he said.
He described to The Intercept how easy it would have been for someone to obtain the material, which was marked with warnings like “DISTRIBUTION LIMITED TO U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES ONLY,” “REQUESTS FOR THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE REFERRED TO AND APPROVED BY THE DOD,” and “IBM Confidential.” At the time of his discovery, Adam wrote to me in an email:
All of this leaky data is courtesy of what I can only assume are misconfigurations in the IMAS (Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing) department at NYU. Not even a single username or password separates these files from the public internet right now. It’s absolute insanity.
The files were taken down after Adam notified NYU.
Intelligence agencies like the NSA hide code-breaking advances like WindsorGreen because their disclosure might accelerate what has become a cryptographic arms race. Encrypting information on a computer used to be a dark art shared between militaries and mathematicians. But advances in cryptography, and rapidly swelling interest in privacy in the wake of Snowden, have helped make encryption tech an effortless, everyday commodity for consumers. Web connections are increasingly shielded using the HTTPS protocol, end-to-end encryption has come to popular chat platforms like WhatsApp, and secure phone calls can now be enabled simply by downloading some software to your device. The average person viewing their checking account online or chatting on iMessage might not realize the mathematical complexity that’s gone into making eavesdropping impractical.
The spread of encryption is a good thing — unless you’re the one trying to eavesdrop. Spy shops like the NSA can sometimes thwart encryption by going around it, finding flaws in the way programmers build their apps or taking advantage of improperly configured devices. When that fails, they may try and deduce encryption keys through extraordinarily complex math or repeated guessing. This is where specialized systems like WindsorGreen can give the NSA an edge, particularly when the agency’s targets aren’t aware of just how much code-breaking computing power they’re up against.
Adam declined to comment on the specifics of any conversations he might have had with the Department of Defense or IBM. He added that NYU, at the very least, expressed its gratitude to him for notifying it of the leak by mailing him a poster.
While he was trying to figure out who exactly the Windsor files belonged to and just how they’d wound up on a completely naked folder on the internet, Adam called David Chudnovsky, the world-renowned mathematician and IMAS co-director at NYU. Reaching Chudnovsky was a cinch, because his entire email outbox, including correspondence with active members of the U.S. military, was for some reason stored on the NYU drive and made publicly available alongside the Windsor documents. According to Adam, Chudnovsky confirmed his knowledge of and the university’s involvement in the supercomputing project; The Intercept was unable to reach Chudnovsky directly to confirm this. The school’s association is also strongly indicated by the fact that David’s brother Gregory, himself an eminent mathematician and professor at NYU, is listed as an author of a 164-page document from the cache describing the capabilities of WindsorGreen in great detail. Although the brothers clearly have ties to WindsorGreen, there is no indication they were responsible for the leak. Indeed, the identity of the person or persons responsible for putting a box filled with military secrets on the public internet remains utterly unclear.
An NYU spokesperson would not comment on the university’s relationship with the Department of Defense, IBM, or the Windsor programs in general. When The Intercept initially asked about WindsorGreen the spokesperson seemed unfamiliar with the project, saying they were “unable to find anything that meets your description.” This same spokesperson later added that “no NYU or NYU Tandon system was breached,” referring to the Tandon School of Engineering, which houses the IMAS. This statement is something of a non sequitur, since, according to Adam, the files leaked simply by being exposed to the open internet — none of the material was protected by a username, password, or firewall of any kind, so no “breach” would have been necessary. You can’t kick down a wide open door.
The documents, replete with intricate processor diagrams, lengthy mathematical proofs, and other exhaustive technical schematics, are dated from 2005 to 2012, when WindsorGreen appears to have been in development. Some documents are clearly marked as drafts, with notes that they were to be reviewed again in 2013. Project progress estimates suggest the computer wouldn’t have been ready for use until 2014 at the earliest. All of the documents appear to be proprietary to IBM and not classified by any government agency, although some are stamped with the aforementioned warnings restricting distribution to within the U.S. government. According to one WindsorGreen document, work on the project was restricted to American citizens, with some positions requiring a top-secret security clearance — which as Adam explains, makes the NYU hard drive an even greater blunder:
Let’s, just for hypotheticals, say that China found the same exposed NYU lab server that I did and downloaded all the stuff I downloaded. That simple act alone, to a large degree, negates a humongous competitive advantage we thought the U.S. had over other countries when it comes to supercomputing.
The only tool Adam used to find the NYU trove was Shodan.io, a website that’s roughly equivalent to Google for internet-connected, and typically unsecured, computers and appliances around the world, famous for turning up everything from baby monitors to farming equipment. Shodan has plenty of constructive technical uses but also serves as a constant reminder that we really ought to stop plugging things into the internet that have no business being there.
The WindsorGreen documents are mostly inscrutable to anyone without a Ph.D. in a related field, but they make clear that the computer is the successor to WindsorBlue, a next generation of specialized IBM hardware that would excel at cracking encryption, whose known customers are the U.S. government and its partners.
Experts who reviewed the IBM documents said WindsorGreen possesses substantially greater computing power than WindsorBlue, making it particularly adept at compromising encryption and passwords. In an overview of WindsorGreen, the computer is described as a “redesign” centered around an improved version of its processor, known as an “application specific integrated circuit,” or ASIC, a type of chip built to do one task, like mining bitcoin, extremely well, as opposed to being relatively good at accomplishing the wide range of tasks that, say, a typical MacBook would handle. One of the upgrades was to switch the processor to smaller transistors, allowing more circuitry to be crammed into the same area, a change quantified by measuring the reduction in nanometers (nm) between certain chip features. The overview states:
The WindsorGreen ASIC is a second-generation redesign of the WindsorBlue ASIC that moves from 90 nm to 32 nm ASIC technology and incorporates performance enhancements based on our experience with WindsorBlue. We expect to achieve at least twice the performance of the WindsorBlue ASIC with half the area, reduced cost, and an objective of half the power. We also expect our system development cost to be only a small fraction of the WindsorBlue development cost because we carry forward intact much of the WindsorBlue infrastructure.
Çetin Kaya Koç is the director of the Koç Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which conducts cryptographic research. Koç reviewed the Windsor documents and told The Intercept that he has “not seen anything like [WindsorGreen],” and that “it is beyond what is commercially or academically available.” He added that outside of computational biology applications like complex gene sequencing (which it’s probably safe to say the NSA is not involved in), the only other purpose for such a machine would be code-breaking: “Probably no other problem deserves this much attention to design an expensive computer like this.”
Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, a hacker and computer hardware researcher who reviewed the documents at The Intercept’s request, said that WindsorGreen would surpass many of the most powerful code-breaking systems in the world: “My guess is this thing, compared to the TOP500 supercomputers at the time (and probably even today) pretty much wipes the floor with them for anything crypto-related.” Conducting a “cursory inspection of power and performance metrics,” according to Huang, puts WindsorGreen “heads and shoulders above any publicly disclosed capability” on the TOP500, a global ranking of supercomputers. Like all computers that use specialized processors, or ASICs, WindsorGreen appears to be a niche computer that excels at one kind of task but performs miserably at anything else. Still, when it comes to crypto-breaking, Huang believes WindsorGreen would be “many orders of magnitude … ahead of the fastest machines I previously knew of.”
But even with expert analysis, no one beyond those who built the thing can be entirely certain of how exactly an agency like the NSA might use WindsorGreen. To get a better sense of why a spy agency would do business with IBM, and how WindsorGreen might evolve into WindsorOrange (or whatever the next generation may be called), it helps to look at documents provided by Snowden that show how WindsorBlue was viewed in the intelligence community. Internal memos from Government Communications Headquarters, the NSA’s British counterpart, show that the agency was interested in purchasing WindsorBlue as part of its High Performance Computing initiative, which sought to help with a major problem: People around the world were getting too good at keeping unwanted eyes out of their data.
Under the header “what is it, and why,” one 2012 HPC document explains, “Over the past 18 months, the Password Recovery Service has seen rapidly increasing volumes of encrypted traffic … the use of much greater range of encryption techniques by our targets, and improved sophistication of both the techniques themselves and the passwords targets are using (due to improved OPSec awareness).” Accordingly, GCHQ had begun to “investigate the acquisition of WINDSORBLUE … and, subject to project board approval, the procurement of the infrastructure required to host the a [sic] WINDSORBLUE system at Benhall,” where the organization is headquartered.
Among the Windsor documents on the NYU hard drive was an illustration of an IBM computer codenamed “Cyclops,” (above) which appears to be a WindsorBlue/WindsorGreen predecessor. A GCHQ document provided by Snowden (below) describes Cyclops as an “NSA/IBM joint development.”
In April 2014, Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper reported that the Norwegian Intelligence Service had purchased a cryptographic computer system code-named STEELWINTER, based on WindsorBlue, as part of a $100 million overhaul of the agency’s intelligence-processing capabilities. The report was based on a document provided by Snowden:
The document does not say when the computer will be delivered, but in addition to the actual purchase, NIS has entered into a partnership with NSA to develop software for decryption. Some of the most interesting data NIS collects are encrypted, and the extensive processes for decryption require huge amounts of computing power.
Widespread modern encryption methods like RSA, named for the initials of the cryptographers who developed it, rely on the use of hugely complex numbers derived from prime numbers. Speaking very roughly, so long as those original prime numbers remain secret, the integrity of the encoded data will remain safe. But were someone able to factor the hugely complex number — a process identical to the sort of math exercise children are taught to do on a chalkboard, but on a massive scale — they would be able to decode the data on their own. Luckily for those using encryption, the numbers in question are so long that they can only be factored down to their prime numbers with an extremely large amount of computing power. Unluckily for those using encryption, government agencies in the U.S., Norway, and around the globe are keenly interested in computers designed to excel at exactly this purpose.
Given the billions of signals intelligence records collected by Western intelligence agencies every day, enormous computing power is required to sift through this data and crack what can be broken so that it can be further analyzed, whether through the factoring method mentioned above or via what’s known as a “brute force” attack, wherein a computer essentially guesses possible keys at a tremendous rate until one works. The NIS commented only to Dagbladet that the agency “handles large amounts of data and needs a relatively high computing power.” Details about how exactly such “high computing power” is achieved are typically held very close — finding hundreds of pages of documentation on a U.S. military code-breaking box, completely unguarded, is virtually unheard of.
A very important question remains: What exactly could WindsorBlue, and then WindsorGreen, crack? Are modern privacy mainstays like PGP, used to encrypt email, or the ciphers behind encrypted chat apps like Signal under threat? The experts who spoke to The Intercept don’t think there’s any reason to assume the worst.
“As long as you use long keys and recent-generation hashes, you should be OK,” said Huang. “Even if [WindsorGreen] gave a 100x advantage in cracking strength, it’s a pittance compared to the additional strength conferred by going from say, 1024-bit RSA to 4096-bit RSA or going from SHA-1 to SHA-256.”
Translation: Older encryption methods based on shorter strings of numbers, which are easier to factor, would be more vulnerable, but anyone using the strongest contemporary encryption software (which uses much longer numbers) should still be safe and confident in their privacy.
Still, “there are certainly classes of algorithms that got, wildly guessing, about 100x weaker from a brute force standpoint,” according to Huang, so “this computer’s greatest operational benefit would have come from a combination of algorithmic weakness and brute force. For example, SHA-1, which today is well-known to be too weak, but around the time of 2013 when this computer might have come online, it would have been pretty valuable to be able to ‘routinely’ collide SHA-1 as SHA-1 was still very popular and widely used.”
A third expert in computer architecture and security, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the documents and a concern for their future livelihood, told The Intercept that “most likely, the system is intended for brute-forcing password-protected data,” and that it “might also have applications for things like … breaking older/weaker (1024 bit) RSA keys.” Although there’s no explicit reference to a particular agency in the documents, this expert added, “I’m assuming NSA judging by the obvious use of the system.”
Huang and Koç both speculated that aside from breaking encryption, WindsorGreen could be used to fake the cryptographic signature used to mark software updates as authentic, so that a targeted computer could be tricked into believing a malicious software update was the real thing. For the NSA, getting a target to install software they shouldn’t be installing is about as great as intelligence-gathering gifts come.
The true silver bullet against encryption, a technology that doesn’t just threaten weaker forms of data protection but all available forms, will not be a computer like WindsorGreen, but something that doesn’t exist yet: a quantum computer. In 2014, the Washington Post reported on a Snowden document that revealed the NSA’s ongoing efforts to build a “quantum” computer processor that’s not confined to just ones and zeroes but can exist in multiple states at once, allowing for computing power incomparable to anything that exists today. Luckily for the privacy concerned, the world is still far from seeing a functional quantum computer. Luckily for the NSA and its partners, IBM is working hard on one right now.
Repeated requests for comment sent to over a dozen members of the IBM media relations team were not returned, nor was a request for comment sent to a Department of Defense spokesperson. The NSA declined to comment. GCHQ declined to comment beyond its standard response that all its work “is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.”
Documents
Documents published with this story:
- IBM: Pages From WindsorGreen ASIC Status Report 12 07 2012 (from NYU files)
- GCHQ: Excerpt from Hpc Overview 1011 (from Snowden files)
Unfortunately, the Intercept decided not to publish most of the document, so all of those people with “a Ph.D. in a related field” can’t read and understand WindsorGreen’s capabilities. What sorts of key lengths can the machine brute force? Is it optimized for symmetric or asymmetric cryptanalysis? Random brute force or dictionary attacks? We have no idea.
I am so proud this time to be the only one whose comments has been “responsibly” flagged as “status”:”hold”!
https://ipsoscustodes.wordpress.com/2016/07/09/it-is-all-about-status-on-theintercept/#comment-88
I can’t understand why. As you may have noticed, I am never ad hominem and all I say is either based on facts or falsifiable
RCL
ON THE OTHER HAND this article may just be bait to tempt hackers to going to NYU to see what else they have whilst the nsa lays in wait. Being as this tech is said to be seriously out of date, i would bet a bunch that is what the objective really is. Any takers?
No, not takers here.
First, notwithstanding that I have disagreed with Sam over specific tech issues, he’s undoubtedly an honest and stand-up guy who would never play such a game.
Second, it is no longer necessary (or possible) to go to NYU for the material. It isn’t available there, any longer, but is is available in lots of other places. The people who can use it can find it.
Ha! That “sometimes” is so, but so deceiving!
The half @ssed way in which this piece was written and “the discoverer”‘s “reasoning” and behavior made me think like you, but I still think you are overestimating them. They do make mistakes and many! At times mistakes which totally destroy their very own raison d’être. Here are two good examples; Chinese or Russian or whoever hackers got all their records going back to the 70’s when they started to have electronic databases and the notorious East German secret police took care of keeping everything on paper and minding their business, but they had no real contingency plans to destroy all that paper and, partially, they never saw it coming, leaving the largest extant corpus in history any institution has ever left behind to posterity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi_Records_Agency
Ironically, those OPM officers were concerned about all that data being used to blackmail high ranking U.S. politicians. Poetic justice, indeed! The U.S. government, like the East German one, has become one of those governments which when something they consider to be “bad” happens to them, “We the people” know for sure it is something good for us. In fact, in the case of USG it would be something good for humanity at large.
krishna e bera, if people would only partially understand you!
We keep b#llsh!tting one another talking about how tall, how thick a tree is, how deep into the ground its roots go, when they are way past that, thinking not of “the forest”, but ALL FORESTS!
Everybody is b#llsh!tting everybody else with their obfuscation on encryption, which IMO doesn’t matter much, but this is the kind of [email protected] that fires up people’s imagination. Apparently, people like to think of themselves as modern day Alan Turings cracking the encrypting inner workings of Enigma devices.
At the end of the day language is not that random, language usage is easily Zeitgeistable in a societal level and individual language use is also very predictable. Yes, decrypting just one file is hard and blah, blah, blah, … but once they are able to correlate exhaustive corpora from large streams of information from all individuals of a society, encryption is the least of their worries.
Speaking of tress and forests:
// __ Mike Rogers: You Can’t Have Your Privacy Violated If You Don’t Know About It
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131029/18020225059/mike-rogers-you-cant-have-your-privacy-violated-if-you-dont-know-about-it.shtml
~
// __ Mike Rogers’ view of privacy Mike Rogers explains that as long as you don’t know your privacy is being violated, it’s not.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4470916/mike-rogers-view-privacy
~
RCL
BTW, guys, I didn’t have epilepsy before I saw the banner graphic for this piece. Now, I’m in full gran mal and chewing through my tongue.
Could you please consider working with graphics people with a subtler design sense and less repressed anger?
What operating system does this thing run? Beowulf clusters? Or a Linux-based kernel like I/O Node Kernel?
What kind of processors? Xeons? AMDs? Xeon Phi(s) or Graphics card processors like Teslas?
My guess is that the OS is Unix-like; IBM does not like to pay license fees. They might be using Intel CPUs but as the article states the number crunching is being done using an ASIC. In any computation, there is the choice of performing any given operation using a general purpose arithmetic logic unit (ALU) under the command of software, or specially built hardware with less software. For instance, if one has two strings of digits of length say 1024, one can use a 64 bit ALU to sequentially XOR one with the other; that would take 16 x 2 = 32 read and write cycles, plus 16 each, 64 bit XORs. In hardware, it would take one each read and write cycle and one XOR, a 16-fold speedup. On top of that, ASICs can be made to run much faster because of their smaller size so an additional speed advantage could be realized.
IBM has made the choice to get out of the commercial computer business; having sold their PC business to the (Chinese) firm Lenovo about a decade ago. They have also sold off all their domestic semiconductor facilities; for example their crown jewel in East Fishkill NY was sold to Saudi investors (yes, Saudi; they are widely known for their semiconductor design expertise [not]). Nonetheless their supercomputer designs are their own; they do not ordinarily use other people’s chips.
Yup. For what’s left of Big Blue, the old motto, “Not invented here,” still applies.
Also applicable is, “The stuff we invented but couldn’t sell was offloaded in fire sales,” but that one isn’t bandied about as much.
Speaking of computer breaches, THIS ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/world/europe/uk-national-health-service-cyberattack.html?_r=0 ) is the end of Bitcoin.
The idea that “Bitcoin” could be a safe way to collect ransomware money always should have been absurd – the blockchain contains records of the transactions, and it is possible to track where the tainted Bitcoins go. Even if Bitcoin banks like to mix up their coins in transactions where they make new ones out of a pool of old ones, the interpretation that could be — and I think now WILL be — imposed is one where every single Bitcoin out of that pool is forfeitable.
I think this is the moment, if you have them, to sell at any price — tell me how I’m wrong.
Bitcoin has been used for illegal transactions since its inception. Recent events change literally nothing.
Who is going to impose this rule? Who determines which coins are not allowed to be used? What is to stop anyone from doing this? How would something like this even be technically feasible?
Bitcoins are only rarely traded as single units, most often they are traded in only very tiny fractions, and while yes, you can track which wallets are transferred to, trying to track “individual bitcoins” is virtually impossible.
Even a system such as you describe doesn’t make any sense, because if you transfer stolen bitcoins to a wallet, and that wallet now has to forfeit all their bitcoins, all anyone would have to do is to collect stolen coins and transfer them to people with a lot of money to make them lose it all.
Anyway, it’s obvious that you haven’t thought this out, and I’m upset for wasting my time to respond to this nonsense.
Cyclops? The all seeing eye of the Federal government?
Total Information Awareness (TIA) symbol? The all seeing eye above the pyramid.
The one dollar bill? The all seeing eye above the pyramid.
Seal of Colorado and DARPA’s Information Awareness Office? The all seeing eye inside of a pyramid.
Coincidence?
Clearly it all means that Ben Franklin was a l33t h4x0r.
What, you think all he did with that lightning rod was protect homes? Everyone knows it was really a free Wi-Fi hotspot and he used UTF-8 before ASCII was even a thing.
;)
Previous reporting on the excesses of prosecutions under the broadly written Computer Fraud and Abuse act makes we wonder if prosecution for downloading is possible even the files were completely unprotected. “Exceeding authorized access” can mean just knowing you’re not supposed to.
Why does this publication insist on employing an inept writer for stories that require comprehension of Technology and Governmental structure/history/function?
Every singly time a story of import or interest is lobbed in this particular writers direction out pops this steaming turd. I could regurgitate better feeding off of the bile a cat yaks up and typing drunk.
Indeed, but it is not a problem unique to this particular writer or web site. In general, reporting on scientific topics in the english language media is dismal.
I once had an argument with the editor of a supposed scientific magazine (not a journal) about their oversimplification of scientific material to the degree that it was no longer truthful; and he defended himself by saying that simplification is necessary to convey information to ordinary people. I countered by noting that true geniuses like Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman were able to explain their work in a way that was comprehensible to non-scientists without compromising any of the underlying principles, and cancelled my subscription. Nowadays, when I read a headline of some great new discovery in the MSM, I go immediately to a scientific web site, run by a professional scientific organization such as the American Physical Society, and get the story there. Nine times out of ten, the MSM gets it wrong.
I have little doubt that the incompetence of science reporting in the US has contributed to the widely held anti-scientific attitude among the populace, and to the distrust of scientists on critical issues such as anthropogenic climate change.
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences – Naomi Oreskes; Kristin Shrader-Frechette; Kenneth Belitz
Science, New Series, Vol. 263, No. 5147. (Feb. 4, 1994), pp. 641-646
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c75d/9457985303b84d3726440151a46d7135a428.pdf
Excerpts:
Verification and validation of numerical models of natural systems is impossible. This is because natural systems are never closed and because model results are always non-unique. Models can be confirmed by the demonstration of agreement between observation and prediction, but confirmation is inherently partial. Complete confirmation is logically precluded by the fallacy of affirming the consequent and by incomplete access to natural phenomena. Models can only be evaluated in relative terms, and their predictive value is always open to question. The primary value of models is heuristic.
Numerical models are increasingly being used in the public arena, in some cases to justify highly controversial decisions. Therefore, the implication of truth is a serious matter. The terms verification and validation are now being used by scientists in ways that are contradictory and misleading. In the earth sciences-hydrology, geochemistry, meteorology, and oceanography-numerical models always represent complex open systems in which the operative processes are incompletely understood and the required empirical input data are incompletely known. Such models can never be verified.
In a word, BULLSHIT.
Here is an example of a numerical model. I plan to drop a cannon ball from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and wish to estimate how long it will take to reach the ground. Starting with the equation F = mg (g being the acceleration of gravity at the earth’s surface) I integrate to find S = 1/2 gt^2, which I invert to find t = sqrt(2S/g) where S is the height of the tower. That is a full fledged numerical model, and its prediction will be good enough that you cannot notice any discrepancy using the finest stopwatch.
But if you automate the measurement and achieve millisecond timing you will notice a slight discrepancy, that can be accounted for (to fractions of a millisecond) by taking aerodynamic drag and the bouyant force on the cannon ball into account. Unfortunately, that model no longer has a closed form solution and so must be run using numerical methods, involving calculation of forces and resulting motion for each of N successive time steps, where N is chosen to be large enough to ensure the accuracy of the particular numerical integration algorithm you have chosen, e.g., the trapezoidal rule.
That is an example of a numerical model. Numerical models are employed extensively in fields like aerodynamics; these kinds of calculations are of sufficient complexity that they challenge the biggest, fastest supercomputers on the planet. That they work can be verified by simply looking up to see any modern airplane flying overhead. I might point out that the same criticisms that your quote gives can be applied to the field of aerodynamics. All of science is about approximation, and whereas we strive for perfection we are ticked pink when our models are good enough for the purposes intended.
But in any case, your response to Winston is great. I would only add that a far more complex example is this electronic communication we do with computers. The underlying physics is not easy, and if it did not predict the rights results, we would have none of this. But the physics itself is only the first step. Practical solutions always involve computing, that is, numerical modeling. And it works really well. Otherwise, we would still be computing with relays and vacuum tubes.
I do not think that they did that at all. I think that hardly any non-scientists have ever actually understood the significance and implications of either relativity or QM from reading from reading their popular works. These things are just not that easy to understand. A related example: Feynman’s Lectures, intended for undergraduates, but too difficult even for Cal Tech students. Yet they do not look that difficult if you look at them as a mature scientist. It is easy to underestimate how much scientific training changes the way you look at things. (And that is something almost any non-scientist can tell you!)
If there was a drive connected to the internet, it was placed there for no other reason than to be found. The best tool ever used by any government agency is deflection. We see it all through history. You will never see anything that is not meant to be seen. It was placed so that an article could be written about “the find.” Truth is the only way out of the pig sty we live in, whether you are Bezos with close to a trillion dollars or any other commonplace billionaire. The is only one piece of advice. C+ is antiquated by any standard you can compare it to. There are many high levels of coding now which not many understand. Deflection from truth is devastating.
What if all this were a counterintelligence plant to see who follows up on it and exposes themselves?
Oh, wait….
Go to Wikipedia and search the term “dead drop.”
Now scroll down to where it says “Considerations” and read it…and weep.
This was the DEFINITION of the Hillary Clinton bathroom server, and it is also the DEFINITION of what went on here and is described in the article.
I cannot believe that The Intercept is unaware.
I thought you guys were smarter than that.
To Sam Biddle: Please explain to the readers that the quantum machine you describe is really an experiment because the states of the machine at any time are probabilistic guesses — not exact! This makes quantum computing essentially theory, and throwing darts.
That is not true. Bt it is true that a certain restricted class of problems are most likely to be solved with QC, at least in the near future.
meh…all this gibber garb with be obsolete when they get quantum computer fully realized.
Blame the Psychopaths in Office for the last 15 years.
That’s why they hate Trump. He hasn’t been pwned, yet.
So, is it:
– A plant to catch a mole
– Just another project that really did not move forward
– A plant to misdirect the media, other spy agencies, and the public
“…Defense Department’s signals intelligence wing, the National Security Agency.”
Uh, no…
The NSA is not under the charter of the Pentagon and the Director of the NSA does not report to the Secretary of Defense.
You need to just go ahead and Google NSA and DoD and then you need to examine whether you should make comments online.
The NSA is a Defense Agency and falls under the DoD. The Director is appointed by the SecDef, and reports to the Secretary of Defense through both the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and US Strategic Command, depending on the function of the report. You can check NSA.gov if you’d like to learn more.
Back in the day – people went to jail for life for this kind of thing ….sadly Time to make examples of someone …there is way to much of this kind of security breech going on ….
the old saying ….”loose lip sinks ships ” …leaky internet connections may sink nations ….
NYU leftist idiots.
Accidently exposed? Yeah, right.
exactly.
So do I have this right — you’re telling me you had a heads up about a massive trove of military spy infrastructure documents, and you throw us a couple of censored illustrations… [I deleted the next three lines, what’s the point]
Here’s hoping that the site and documents were widely discovered and distributed before NYU was informed, and that Windsor Green was a total, expensive, heartbreaking and depressing failure.
LOL. Right on Doug, that made my day.
What are you talking about? Once it is out, it is out. It does not matter when NYU was informed as long as someone willing to distribute it has a copy.
And what is this about a failure? It is a step in a process, that is all. The US government is willing to pay for development, even if it is not all that useful because it might lead to something useful in the future. And that is despite the fact that encryption will very likely always be way ahead of straightforward cracking. picking around the edges of the problem, finding subtle flaws, etc. is what this might be good for.
Mike, I think it might be useful if you read the story, again, read my short comment, again, and then sorted out your own comment to see whether it is responsive — and if so, to what — and to separate the parts that have noting to do with what I said into a separate, standalone comment.
And just so it’s clear: I don’t want the US government to be the least bit more successful than they already may be in defeating encryption. They’ve demonstrated that they cannot, in the slightest, be trusted.
What a BS answer, Doug. If you have something specific to say, say it.
I said it. Then you babbled on, irrelevantly and confusedly.
Then I suggested you review your babbling.
Now you are offended and either deflecting or simply more confused.
Not offended, maybe confused. But I think you are confused. If you really think I am confused, why not attempt to explain it?
As I read these kinds of articles – I mean 180,000 cores!? I bet Elder Scrolls would run awesome with that kind of computing power – so why would the NSA use all this when my current cyber security/defense project – http://www.cupidtechnologies.com/wicupid.html – would keep honest people honest and use all this computing power for those who do not use the tech. *Sigh*
If someone leaves their front door open, that doesn’t make it legal to go it and take their stuff.
This “adam” should be handed over to the authorities.
The masters thank you for your support.
Do you prefer gold stars or Brownie points?
Really? Accidentally?
Congratulations on writing and clear and easy to understand article. In today’s high stakes cyber warfare the perpetrator needs to be identified, tried for treason and then executed if found guilty.
The days of accidents like this are over and the stakes are the lives of every citizen in the country. Our competitors don’t play around they are very serious and very busy at cyber subversion.
And they worry that Russia may be doing something… only by their own stupidity!
Meanwhile the government is throwing away ten billion dollars a year to monitor the emails of everyday Americans…
NYU should be denied even a penny of federal funding – no student loan dollars, no money for research, not a sou.
You can assume if you are allowed to use publicly available encryption (all the stuff mentioned in this story is publicly available), they can break into it if they need to. It’s all broken.
So you have a 164 page document available, but you released 4 pages, one of which is heavily redacted. What was on the redacted page? Where are the other 160 pages? Don’t you think some of the information on the other pages might be useful to figuring out how powerful the computing cluster is and which encryption strengths and length of passwords it could reasonably crack? For example how many FLOPS can each ASIC core compute. How many SHAx hashes it can computer per second. Surely a few journalists can’t provide that analysis and it is better left to scientists, mathematicians, cryptographers and security analysts in the public. It could be that they could run the numbers and figure out that it could crack anything short of a 14 character password in a reasonable amount of time. Wouldn’t it be worth the public knowing about that capability so they can use stronger passwords? The more I see these limited hangout type articles the more I think Wikileaks would have been a better place to dump such documents. At least they post the whole lot at once. They’re not withholding anything back. They don’t dribble it out and publish essentially worthless pieces of information.
Oops. And … maybe “brilliant” is a bit overindulgent when describing the esteemed brothers?
Excellent write-up. Kudos to the author.
Also, anyone who thinks this information was left unsecured by accident is simple-minded. This is what communists do to subvert, and the university system is full of them. This might have been excused in the early 90s, but these days it should not get a pass. The persons responsible for this breach should be arrested and charged with treason just to make an example. The US government is highly invested in research, and now has to check the security of all universities doing the jobs just to be safe.
This is far worse than a simple student lab or project being stumbled upon. This is like ‘accidentally stumbling across every test with answers for every class at every college in the country’ bad.
Exactly. Accidentally on purpose.
Not nearly full enough. ;^)
Now, time for you to return to the Cold War. Call the Doctor and ask for a ride in the TARDIS.
Oh this is the perfect alibi for the Chinese grad student in charge.
Oops. My bad. I can’t believe I overlooked that.
so this is a free-the-monkeys and save-the-whales operation? for a TOTALLY USELESS SYSTEM? so you found a better use for your head than the usual?
btw – the US is highly invested in financing wallstreet to rob the public with their useless projects. pick up your check on the way out.
Thanks for the article. It was very informative and well written.
Regarding an assumption posited in the article..
“To get a better sense of why a spy agency would do business with IBM, and how WindsorGreen might evolve into WindsorOrange (or whatever the next generation may be called)”
Perhaps, WindsorYellow?
Which then begs the questions, was Cyclops WindsorViolet and what will they do after WindsorRed?
IBM…IBM…the same IBM that provided specialzed computing technology to the Nazis for tracking Jews? That IBM?
Great comment. How little we really know and how soon we forget.
Have you seen “Hitler, A Career”?
That’s where I learned about IBM’s involvement with the Nazis.
One of the best documentaries, especially visually, about the development and subsequent fall of the Third Reich .
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/ – A book wich goes into great detail about IBM’s involvement with Hitler.
Yeah that same IBM that got Bill Gates to create an operating system for government computers then a retail market one which the government can access at any time to monitor everyone in the nation 24/7…since the next holocaust will be working-class Americans slaughtered by their ‘out-of-control’ government.
Free speech is now a threat to government.
Rising wages are now a threat to government.
Free association is now a threat to government.
The government protects itself from the people it represents.
We live under a tyranny.
Another non-story; nobody is going to learn anything of importance from any document marked “IBM Confidential”. Hell, at their facilities, that’s the watermark on their toilet paper.
The idea behind these kinds of massively parallel machines is to process encrypted messages simultaneously using different guesses as to the codes, or alternatively simultaneously decrypt lots of messages simultaneously if you can derive the key – as is the case for most of the 64 and 128 bit encryption methods that are commercially available.
i asked a tech person what the encryption has evolved to and she said it is now 4096 bits and SHA3, whatever that is but 2 up from sha1
There are shortcuts to break all these cyphers. e.g. anything time based, you can significantly narrow the range of guesses to around the time the message was sent, assuming the key was generated right before sending. This is true for VPN’s and SSL in many cases.
Pffft, that’s old stuff. The thing now is SHA11, which stands for SpinalTap Hash Algorithm 11.
It’s basically a hash program. Large salts and hashes are decrypted by raw brute force attack. The more efficient the program the less hardware needed. It’s also possible it has man in the middle decrypting software.
yet another “hey mom, look what i can do” “bill the taxpayer” project.
i read the story about Turing and it was about such a machine that deciphered based on character scrambling. However if you were to say shred the MONA LISA painting, or say some image with sloppy characters in comouflage, how would you ever decipher that? YOU WOULDN’T.
When faced with the impending overrun of the US embassy in Tehran the embassy staff shredded all (or virtually all) its sensitive documents. The Iranians took the shredded material, which incidentally was not produced using the kind of shredder one buys at the local office supply store, and reassembled the documents. It took lots of time, but they did it.
When you think about it, a shredded document is like a text stream encrypted using a Caesar cypher: very easy to break.
sure – matching up the straight line type of IBM selectrics, and knowing in advance the serif typeface and headers and footers, sure. But as i tried to imply, squigly type in camouflage, currently done in many submit boxes, if near impossible. Using 100 images with only 1 page # having the meaningful msg would make such comms practically impossible. If they were battlefield instructions, the time requirement would render decypher efforts quite useless.
Not if you had the hardware power of the cyber division. They just need a program that can run the math. They have the hardware to track every email in our country. If they need more they run huge bot nets that give them even more computing power.
Indeed the time element is an important part of security. In fact, it is all about time, because any possible encryption scheme involves a finite number of elements, and can be broken by means of a brute force attack, which involves trying every possible permutation and combination of code elements. One of the ideas behind security is to make the time required for a brute force attack to succeed so long that by the time the adversary has the information, it is no longer of any use. This applies not only in the battlefield! For instance, if two companies are involved in a criminal price fixing conspiracy and encode all their communications using a technique that takes more than 7 years to decode by authorities, then they succeed, because of the statute of limitations.
The time element is the reason why people should always use long, random (machine generated) combinations of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters as passwords. The 4 digit PIN used by most banks and credit card companies requires no more than 10,000 attempts to break (which is why the ATMs only give you a few attempts before locking the account) whereas a 10 digit code per the above prescription requires as many as 57 to the 10th power, or 3.6E17 (3.6 with 17 zeroes) attempts. Things like network passwords should be even longer.
The fireplace would’ve been more efficient.
Exactly, but it suffers the problem of being low tech. And think of all the shredder factories that would be put out of business if people resorted to burning their unwanted sensitive documents!
So IBM is working on a really fast computer and someone accidentally put some powerpoints meant for internal use in the wrong directory? What a scoop, Sam. There’s already a quantum computing network that’s been running under the streets of Boston for over a decade, you can use google to find this and many other highly unclassified government non-secrets.
January 16, 2017 DoD Cybersecurity Discipline Implementation Plan February 2016
As part of the Campaign, this Implementation Plan is grouped into four Lines of Effort. The requirements within each Line of Effort represent a prioritization of all existing DoD cybersecurity requirements. Each Line of Effort focuses on a different aspect of cybersecurity defense-in-depth that is being exploited by our adversaries to gain access to DoD information networks.
https://publicintelligence.net/dod-cybersecurity-discipline/
“and a concern for their future livelihood . . . “
Such is the world we live in.
On a somewhat related note, I’m concerned that the online password protector, LastPass, is probably leaking data. Their new vault interface uses corporate logos and such which means that they must be looking your various website accounts (urls) and finding the appropriate logos to match. Thus, leaking metadata from your account.
This looks like a legal attack. Someone bought LastPass then implemented a series of “upgrades” which now have the potential to leak a user’s private information.
Be warned.
Indeed. FYI I use Password Vault, which features AES 256 bit encryption, which is currently believed to be secure. It was privately developed, and does not connect to the internet. You are absolutely correct: anything which connects to the internet is by definition insecure.
Also, I keep getting offers for a program by Intel, and would not download it if they paid me.
In my experience, IBM products are just as overpriced as those of Apple. I’m not going to fall for this bit of viral marketing.
I wish I had your restraint. Being a person of low discernment with even lower impulse control, I would absolutely buy one of these things.
Maybe two or three of them.
On the podcast yesterday Jeremy wondered aloud if Trump (in our world of infinite possibilities) may well have heretofore unappreciated 4D chess capabilities despite the MSMs assessment that his haphazard decision trees reflect a capacity for “lower discernment and even lower impulse control…”
The old saying is still true today. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”
IBM hasn’t made consumer grade desktops or laptops for more than a decade
Consumer grade? I want nothing less than a WindsorGreen. I frequently forget my encryption keys and passwords and have to break into my accounts by brute force.
One wishes this was a discussion forum. This line would keep us all laughing for years to come if we put it in a signature!
This is interesting and all, but more interesting still would be the “mathematical proofs” you mentioned. Not only would this tell people which algorithm this aimed against (sha-1/RSA/AES/whatever), but it might advance the field of mathematics and ensure better algorithms.
Sure such a release would be exceptionally dry and for a niche audience only, but it would do a world of good. Please release those.
i second this.
As Huang pointed out – this is an arms race that the NSA will *always* lose.
Increasing key lengths and using advanced hashes is trivial compared to the exponential effort required to break them.
As for quantum computing – It would take the entire computational capability (as determined by cosmic energy) IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE about 4 billion years to brute force a 4096 key.
They dont need to win against everyone, they only need to break the weak points in any given target organization. That means the 70% that use bad passwords or dont update software or click past certificate warnings or buy off the self hardware.
Maybe they’re not just trying to break them, but make them unbreakable…
Your description of computational capability describes non-quantum BPP-complexity approaches to factorization, not quantum computing. Factorization with a BQP-capable quantum computer would be solvable in polynomial time.
A couple of remarks. First off, you do not need a 4096 bit key or a quantum computer to be safe in the current era; 256 bit AES is quite adequate against a brute force attack, PROVIDED you use a strong password.
Secondly it is interesting that TI has not picked up on the story of the CIA’s different approach to code breaking. NSA’s approach is to attack the encrypted message, using various software methods in an attempt to decrypt it. This can be extremely difficult, even beyond current capabilities if the adversary uses a good algorithm and a strong password. The CIA chooses to attack the computer used to send the message, capturing the keystrokes as they are typed, and before they are encrypted. This requires accessing the computer and planting a piece of malware, but as we are all aware, that is not hard in most cases.
By the way, the best way to implement secure communications is to compose and encrypt (or decode) messages using a computer that is not connected to any network, using sneaker net to move it back and forth between itself and the machine that is network enabled. Personally, I have a machine that lacks both a network card and a modem. One has to also guard against unwanted material being introduced onto the disconnected machine, and to ensuring that it is not producing useful levels of unwanted emissions. For obvious reasons, I won’t provide any details as to how I do that, but it is pretty easy to figure out a good way of doing it.
Those are fun problems to think about. I read somewhere the metal strip in a video card has been used as an antenna in a hacking demo. I would not have a graphics card in my sneakernet connected computer.
That’s right, and it is the reason why SCIFs are basically Faraday cages. But it is not only a graphics card that radiates; anywhere there is a time varying current, there is radiated electromagnetic energy.
That said, the levels are quite low. So if you are say 100 meters from the nearest house or road, you are pretty safe; the Forces Of Order do not yet drive around in vans with 3 meter diameter antennas on them. But if you are in an apartment, best to work using computer that is enclosed in a grounded, metal screen cage.
I think that the CIA and NSA’s different approaches has to do with their different surveillance roles. The CIA targets foreigners in foreign lands (the CIA charter forbids them from operating on US soil), while the NSA spies on Americans and people in America To place keyloggers or other malware on a PC, you have to either know who you are targeting first or you have to blanket target everyone. As much as the NSA doesn’t give a shit about Constitutional protections, they do in some limited degree have to answer to courts that do theoretically care. Because of that, the NSA can’t just blanket target everyone, or even target specific individuals without just cause. The CIA, because they target non-Americans, can do that as much as they want because non-Americans aren’t protected by the Constitution.