[Beowulf] Leif Nixon gets quoted in Forbes

[Vincent Diepeveen]

I'm not sure i understand what happens.

In itself just cracking SSH is rather easy for governments,
it's just 1024 - 2048 bits RSA, and they can factor that with a  
reasonable beowulf cluster with
special hardware quite easily. You can already prove this for a  
rather old algorithm to be the case,
and i'm sure the math guys got up with something much better nowadays  
- so will China.

So what's the scan really doing, is it a physical verification of  
where you communicate from, so a physical adress,
so mapping every user on this planet to a specific physical location?

How sure is it that China is behind everything knowing they already  
can crack everything anyway?
China gets everywhere the blame, in the meantime i have lots of  
Irani's lurking around here.

Vincent

On Nov 21, 2011, at 8:48 PM, Leif Nixon wrote:

> Greg Lindahl <lindahl at pbm.com> writes:
>
>> Beowulf-list-participant Lief Nixon got quoted in Forbes!
>>
>> http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/11/17/chinas-great- 
>> firewall-tests-mysterious-scans-on-encrypted-connections/
>
> Thank you. Yes, my little discovery seems to have attracted quite a  
> bit
> of attention.
>
> Any list members with users logging in from China, please check  
> your ssh
> logs. I'd be interested in comparing notes with you.
>
> -- 
> Leif Nixon - Security officer
> National Supercomputer Centre - Swedish National Infrastructure for  
> Computing
> Nordic Data Grid Facility - European Grid Infrastructure
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