treejamie

Thursday, September 5, 2013
On the NSA
Let me tell you the story of my tiny brush with the biggest crypto story of the year.

A few weeks ago I received a call from a reporter at ProPublica, asking me background questions about encryption. Right off the bat I knew this was going to be an odd conversation, since this gentleman seemed convinced that the NSA had vast capabilities to defeat encryption. And not in a 'hey, d'ya think the NSA has vast capabilities to defeat encryption?' kind of way. No, he'd already established the defeating. We were just haggling over the details.

Oddness aside it was a fun (if brief) set of conversations, mostly involving hypotheticals. If the NSA could do this, how might they do it? What would the impact be? I admit that at this point one of my biggest concerns was to avoid coming off like a crank. After all, if I got quoted sounding too much like an NSA conspiracy nut, my colleagues would laugh at me. Then I might not get invited to the cool security parties.

All of this is a 

4x3LDev

+-----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Metacharacter  |                                           Description                                                    |
+-----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|        \        | Specifies the next character as either a special character, literal, back reference, or an octal escape. |
|        ^        |    Matches the position at the beginning of the input string.                                            |
|        $        |    Matches the position at the end of the input string.                                                  |
|        *        |    Matches the preceding subexpression zero or more times.                                               |
|        +        |    Matches the preceding subexpression one or more times.                                                |
|