NSA Bullrun program To be fair, it's a little hard to know exactly what all it entailed Snowden release give a fair bit of information about it A bit of history on this: First: What does it take to break a cipher? And how safe are they, really? Key length, obviously Perhaps less so: Differential cryptanalysis The skipjack cipher story An example: Wifi snooping The good old days: Easy! If you're in 252, I got my demo working finally WEP, then WPA, then WPA2 and WPA3 made it much harder Even if you can watch, HTTPS is ubiquitous Can still see where traffic is going! Proxy servers? Tor? Secure DNS and clouds? In order to prevent snooping, what's needed? We've got essentially all the pieces from the bitcoin bit A way to send a key (public key) A signed key for the party we're connecting to (certificates) A symmetric cipher to communicate efficiently with How could the NSA undo any of that? "could" Here's an example: Use heartbleed to recover server's private key Then use the private key to impersonate the server Re-encode the traffic and send it on (man in the middle) Attacker gets an unencrypted copy of the traffic Attacker can also change content Have to be creative to get there in a networking sense Another "could": Contribute changes to key generation algorithms that are less random The should appear random But perhaps the actual generated key space is smaller than expected! Yet another: Pressure a commercial company into granting access Remember, implementation is the source of most security bugs!