How to remain secure against NSA surveillance
<i>1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself.</i><p>SKETCHY ADVICE. Tor might make targeted attacks on you personally take more work, but because Tor attempts to provide anonymity and not confidentiality or integrity, it may make you <i>more</i> susceptible to dragnet surveillance.<p><i>2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec.</i><p>Great advice. But prefer TLS to IPsec, which is largely the provenance of commercial systems and the product of much more vendor-centric standardization.<p><i>3) Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA – so it probably isn't.</i><p>Sure, I guess.<p><i>4) Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors.</i><p>Absolutely, great advice.<p><i>5) Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations.</i><p>This starts out great. This sentence is great. It continues:<p><i>Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography.</i><p>Dead on, absolutely. Number-theoretic public-key crypto is terrifying. But then:<p><i>Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.</i><p>ARGH NO ARGH. First, conventional DLP systems also have suspect parameters. Second, the best ECC systems have parameters of well-known provenance. Third, ECC systems are <i>known</i> to be stronger than DLP systems. In fact, the most likely source of any claim about an NSA cryptographic breakthrough is that NSA has a viable attack on RSA-1024 (an IFP system, but six of one).<p>If you were going to change one thing about the way you decrypted in the wake of today's "new information", make it be that you abandon RSA.