NOBUS (Nobody but Us)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS

by apsec112 • 7 years ago

184 55 7 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

saagarjha• 7 years ago

If there's a vulnerability here that weakens encryption but you still need four acres of Cray computers in the basement in order to work it you kind of think "NOBUS" and that's a vulnerability we are not ethically or legally compelled to try to patch – it's one that ethically and legally we could try to exploit in order to keep Americans safe from others.

Not sure about the law, but I'd say that assuming that nobody else has that kind of computing power is quite arrogant, and it's certainly not "ethical" to keep it undisclosed…

derefr3• 7 years ago

I don't know about arrogant; when you're a state actor, you have available things like a detailed infrared map of the entire Earth, order flow from every chip fab, power figures for all extant power plants with attempted "balancing of the books" against all above-board known uses of that power, etc.

Because of this, it might be unclear exactly what a rival power is doing with all that heat and power and all those chips, but it's very easy to know that they're doing something. And, therefore, very easy to know when you're "ahead", in terms of nowhere else on Earth showing the right MASINT signature to represent the same compute capacity you have.

Mind you, this is commutative; the Russians, Chinese, and other powers with satellite networks can take the same infrared imagery, and do the same maths, to calculate exactly how much more compute the NSA has than they do; and their OPSEC doctrine is necessarily designed around this knowledge.

hinkley3• 7 years ago

I never really thought about this before, but a thermodynamics breakthrough in power supply design, heat management, or power generation could qualify as a state secret.

We know that the NSA makes custom chips, and it's probably harder to know how many calculations per second that hardware can manage than predicting the capacity of COTS hardware based on how hot the building is and how hot the nearest powerplant is getting.

One of the things I loved about the history of the Blackbird is that it held the record for fastest plane, and when a new pretender to the throne arrived, on a couple different occasions they sent up another Blackbird pilot and retook the crown. When a private individual breaks a record, they tend to go as fast as they can. Bragging rights for an military airplane are "mine is faster than yours" not "mine is exactly this much faster than yours". Just keep that classified.

joe_the_user• 7 years ago

Would this NSA capability tell them how much compute capacity China has as result of being the world center of bitcoin mining? Would it tell them whether this capability could repurposed?

Also, can any actor be certain distributed compute capacity can't be harnessed in the fashion of concentrated capacity? How many GPUs does is take to make a Cray, etc?

xscott2• 7 years ago

I don't know about arrogant

Does Google or Amazon have enough compute power to compete with the NSA? My guess would be yes. They certainly have a good cover story if they were interested in using it for exploits. :-)

ohhhhhh• 7 years ago

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190058105A1/en

hinkley3• 7 years ago

I don't remember where I got this threat model, but I think it was Applied Cryptography.

Paraphrased, is your system safe against: an individual hacker, a group, a corporation, a city-state, a nation, a superpower? Are any of the ones you said 'no' to ever likely to give a damn about your software or data?

Then botnets became a thing. Suddenly individuals or small groups could have more resources than a city-state, and every year they just got bigger and bigger. If it's only computing resources that save you (as implied by that quote), that barrier isn't what it used to be. Sophistication of some other kind is the only protection and hubris can kill that off pretty quick too.

ses1984• 7 years ago

Individuals with access to giant botnets tend not to blow it on soft targets.

I think it's reasonable to build systems that are resistant to attacks up to but not including the superpower level.

The worst part is the human factor. The more people involved, the easier it is to compromise one of those people.

samcheng• 7 years ago

It probably wasn't unjustifiably arrogant back in the 90's.

The article mentions evidence that this supremacy is no longer true, but doesn't actually cite any evidence. I suppose they are alluding to private companies (mostly American but quite transnational), and also the Chinese government. Both likely have the kind of talent + computing infrastructure to challenge the NSA.

Do people like Palantir or Google exploit 0-days with the same NOBUS attitude?

peteretep2• 7 years ago

I'd say that assuming that nobody else has that kind of computing power is quite arrogant

Maybe, but there's also probably a team of very smart people whose job it is to consider all of the information and make that call on a case-by-case basis. I'm sure they get it wrong sometimes, but I'd also imagine they get it right most of the time.

it's certainly not "ethical" to keep it undisclosed

Sure, but by that ethical posture nothing the NSA does is ethical. If you accept as ethical the NSA's mission of protecting Americans at the expense of other humans, this particular method seems pretty ethical.

Sean17082• 7 years ago

Not to mention that the idea that the US is the one good country and must be protected to the detriment of all other countries is massively unethical IMO.

wang_li• 7 years ago

The NSA is a US agency. It has nothing to do with being a good country, their job is to protect the US.

LatteLazy• 7 years ago

Isn't the point that they know with a high degree of certainty who is buying large amounts of the sort of computer equipment needed for this? Cray will let them know if the People's Liberation Army places an order for an acre of kit.

I agree about the ethical requirement,but between surveillance and torture, they're well beyond the point of ethical discussion so.

andrewflnr• 7 years ago

I've wondered occasionally if Rijndael was chosen over the other AES finalists so that the NSA would have a NOBUS backdoor in the form of the whole s-box timing side channel thing. Is there any good info/commentary on that possibility?

ggm• 7 years ago

Its impossible to prove absent a snowden-class leak. The premise is they have secret knowledge. Maths is inductive reasoning, they might have a non-inductive insight into a thing which exposes a magic key to them, but they have to do a risk analysis the bad guys (tm) can do the same AHA moment and secure the same advantage.

In this space, I feel about the only public evidence would be when the NSA feel the protocol cannot be trusted for government use, where the primary risk is other-state actors.

I also feel the blurring of the role for the agencies here does nobody any favours. NOBUS confers a specific advantage which massively undermines your own position in the longer term for tactical advantage now. I would probably be told by wiser heads tactics trumps strategy, but when you face 20-50 year relationships and you burned your partners 15 years ago, that tactical win can be a bit of a problem.

The UK did this with Enigma: kept their insight secret and handed the captured units to the commonwealth governments. They did not help their own cause in the 1960s independence wars, trust was close to zero. I have no evidence the ability to decrypt their signals helped or hindered btw. Its conjecture on my part.

badrabbit4• 7 years ago

Could they simply use a different sbox? Or can specific implementations be written to avoid the vuln?

You have to also keep in mind,aes is class-b crypto, the only publicly known class-a ciphers are decades older than aes.

optimiz32• 7 years ago

Extremely unlikely; Rijndael S-Box entries can be calculated in constant time using first principles or bit-slicing. No lookup tables needed.

Timing side-channel vulnerabilities in an AES S-Box implementation would be flaws in the implementation and application as opposed to the algorithm.

badrabbit4• 7 years ago

Yes, they can be calculated in constant time, NSA's friends can be told to use constant time from the start while everyone else used libs that copies from the non constant time reference implementation?

tptacek• 7 years ago

That's the opposite of a NOBUS backdoor; it's an everyone backdoor, since anyone can run a timing attack on AES.

gHosts• 7 years ago

Sort like the short bus, but shorter.

zzo38computer• 7 years ago

Can you write deceptive messages in order to try to determine what kind of messages the government can decrypt?

closeparen• 7 years ago

Taking great care to avoid revealing your capabilities has been integral to spycraft for a long time.

ryacko• 7 years ago

looks at the history of major criminal conspiracy cases and historical events

The answer is throwing everything you have, and only some of the time reveal what you know.

badrabbit4• 7 years ago

That's why parallel reconsruction is a thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

ngcc_hk• 7 years ago

If it is war there is ...

And if you inform everyone that they have vulnerabilities not only that is security leakage it is a kind of security commerical activities without pay.

But nobody it is not. You have Russia and totalitarian china.

... the world is not pure and black And white. The wiki writing is too bias. And too political correct based on the wrong assumption.

Fnoord• 7 years ago

I was thinking about NOBUS in relation to the NSA's finding of a critical security vulnerability in Windows 10 / 2016 [1]. Ie. "how it at least does not apply right now."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048633

LockAndLol• 7 years ago

Sounds a bit pretentious. Pride comes before the fall.

deadbunny• 7 years ago

I was reading thinking NOBUS does sound a lot like HUBRIS.

NOBUS (Nobody but Us)

Related Stories