latest Snowden docs show NSA intercepts all Google and Yahoo DC-to-DC traffic

Mike Lyon mike.lyon at gmail.com
Sat Nov 2 02:18:59 UTC 2013


So even if Goog or Yahoo encrypt their data between DCs, what stops
the NSA from decrypting that data? Or would it be done simply to make
their lives a bit more of a PiTA to get the data they want?

-Mike



> On Nov 1, 2013, at 19:08, Harry Hoffman <hhoffman at ip-solutions.net> wrote:
>
> That's with a recommendation of using RC4.
> Head on over to the Wikipedia page for SSL/TLS and then decide if you want rc4 to be your preference when trying to defend against a adversary with the resources of a nation-state.
>
> Cheers,
> Harry
>
> Niels Bakker <niels=nanog at bakker.net> wrote:
>
>> * mikal at stillhq.com (Michael Still) [Fri 01 Nov 2013, 05:27 CET]:
>>> Its about the CPU cost of the crypto. I was once told the number of
>>> CPUs required to do SSL on web search (which I have now forgotten)
>>> and it was a bigger number than you'd expect -- certainly hundreds.
>>
>> False: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.html
>>
>> "On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than
>> 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less
>> than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot
>> of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time)
>> will help to dispel that."
>>
>>
>>    -- Niels.
>>




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