Research Shows NSA Exploited Flaws to Decrypt Huge Amounts of Communications Instead of Securing the Internet

Andrew Crocker writes:

According to an award-winning paper presented at a security conference earlier this week by a group of prominent cryptographers, the NSA has used its access to vast computing power as well as weaknesses in the commonly used TLS security protocol in order to spy on encrypted communications, including VPNs, HTTPS and SSH. As two of the researchers, Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger explained, it was previously known that the NSA had reached a “breakthrough” allowing these capabilities. The paper represents a major contribution to public understanding by drawing a link between the NSA’s computing resources and previously known cryptographic weaknesses.