New Trusted HW Standard For Windows 8 To Support Chinese Crypto 87
An anonymous reader writes "A new version of the Trusted Platform Module, called TPM2 or TPM 2.0 by Microsoft, has apparently been designed specifically for the release of Windows 8 this week. The details of this new standard have been kept secret. But a major update to the original TPM standard, which came out 10 years ago, seems to have been very quietly released on the Trusted Computing web site (FAQ) earlier this month. Following in the footsteps of the original, this version is quite a challenging read (security through incomprehensibility?). But this new version also seems to support some controversial crypto algorithms that were made public by the 'State Encryption Management Bureau' of China for the first time about 2 years ago. This is roughly the time that Microsoft seems to have begun working in earnest on TPM2, Windows 8, and probably even Surface. But that's probably just a coincidence. This crypto is controversial because of serious EU concerns with domestic restrictions on the implementation, use, and importation of cryptography in China."
It's actually the opposite (Score:4, Insightful)
AES, used by NSA after beeing deemed sufficient for classified information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard#Security [wikipedia.org]
The NSA/CIA may have quite a few (a lot of) bright minds, but they certainly can't compete with the best worldwide cryptographers.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your conspiracy theories.
Re:secret standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's actually the opposite (Score:2, Insightful)
Wrong. NSA has been doing crypto decades before the academic world got interested in it. They have a huge head start. For instance, they knew about differential cryptanalysis in the 70's, while the academic world didn't discover it until the early 90's. They knew about public key crypto several years before Diffie independently discovered it. These are only two examples, there are many more.
Second, the number of PhD mathematicians they have specializing in crypto is greater than the rest of the world's top experts combined. This means they have their own (huge) body of scientific literature on the subject that no one outside of the Agency gets to see. At the same time, they get to see all the public literature. As former NSA cryptologist Brian Snow says, "We get to cheat. We read your journals, but you can't read ours."
As an analogy, imagine that there was a secret agency doing physics in 1900. One of the physicists working for them was Max Planck. This agency discovered the quantum theory and begins unlocking the secrets of the atom. By the 1940's they have the bomb. Now imagine that the public world starts getting interested in physics and discovers quantum theory in the 1930's. It isn't until the 1970's that they get the bomb. This is about the way it is with NSA and crypto -- they have a huge head-start. A lot of the work the academic community has done has been discovered independently (and certainly much later) than NSA.
Third, AES is only approved for classified information in NSA approved systems! This means, the hardware and software implementation has to be vetted by them first (likely to prevent side-channel attacks, of which AES is notoriously susceptible). And AES is not used in any really sensitive systems. For that NSA is going to use their classified Type I ciphers.