Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderThis article cuts to the heart something I've wondered for a long time. The common advice in all the classic texts is that developers should not roll their own crypto because smarter people have thought of more vulnerabilities and addressed them in battle-tested code. But news like this shows that there is an antithesis: the conventional encryption techniques are also potentially widely exploitable by state-level actors. Furthermore if I was someone holding solutions to cherry-picked primes for well-understood…
To summarise: the authors speculate that the NSA invested in a lot of resources into breaking Diffie-Hellman key exchange for certain 1024-bit primes. Just a few hardcoded 1024-bit primes were used in the majority of VPN handshakes and a significant minority of HTTPS and SSH handshakes worldwide in 2015. This would give the NSA the ability to recover the shared symmetric key used in these encrypted communications, and therefore decrypt them. Since then several protocols have shifted towards preferring Elliptic…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 936
- Total comments
- 374
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-12-17 | How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015)First breakout · Best thread | ColanR | 586 | 257 |
| 2020-06-20 | How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015)Latest 20+ point return | notRobot | 347 | 117 |
| 2021-10-10 | How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015) | guiambros | 3 | 0 |