> infrastructure for supercomputing is immense, and very visible in the > sense of taking up a lot of space as well as power requirements. > Those facilities would stick out a country mile, and should be fairly > easy to spot, leading to more focused speculation if nothing else. > > I read in a couple of articles that No Such Agency has their own chip > foundry someplace. It seems reasonable to wonder out loud if they do > not have ASIC attacks against some cryptosystems (does anyone else > remember Deep Crack?) implemented. Perhaps all of the NSA's vaunted > supercomputing power takes the form of racks and racks of servers with > custom ASICs implementing those attacks instead of massively parallel > architectures of general purpose computers running software attacks.
The US does now disclose the aggregate budgets for DoD, DHS, and intel services under which NSA falls as a non line item. A search will yield analyst estimates of the actual black amounts, etc. There's even big wall posters for it all. No budget can exceed taxes plus international revenues, various debt facilities and minus known expenses. It's not Moonshot or war scale, nobody can afford that anymore without a complete overhaul. Yet a chip fab and unspottable underground facilities are entirely within current means. To wit, The Mountain, Raven Rock, Utah DC, defuncts such as Yucca, SSC, and so on. And implementing known attacks via ASIC's where useful is common best practice these days. It comes down to cost/benefit, business and rational guess. Figure out where the state of the art lies (both commercial and estimates of advanced black tech) for the budget, megawatts, floor space, die size, storage, bandwidth, algorithms, attacks, hiring and education programs, history, bit and clock efficiences, problems to solve, goals, etc. Within that answer is where you will find the truth. At least as to capability, if not execution. History shows there are always a few lucky gaping advances out there in the world when compared to commercial tech. Whether the current ones apply to anything people here care about is unknown. And unless you're somehow an actor in that same high intrigue, you don't have anything to worry about on an individual personal level [1] beyond the global and national ramifications of it all. [1] Any common criminal elements, what the dog ate for dinner, facebook, etc. If you're trying to be the next WikiLeaks or political head, maybe there's cause for worry? Maybe not? Tor tech is nice, being public has it's advantages too. _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
