Brazil to begin using encrypted email service to avoid cyber spying

Wednesday, October 16th 2013 - 14:02 UTC

Full article 7 comments

Brazilian officials say that all government employees will start using an encrypted email service in an effort to stop foreign spies from intercepting emails. But experts question the ability of Brazil to protect its government emails from the eyes of the U.S. National Security Agency.

The entire system is compromised if any user of an encrypted email sends a message to somebody on an outside program, like Gmail.

Nevertheless, Communications Minister Paulo Bernardo Silva said on Monday that a new government-created encrypted email system will soon be mandatory for federal officials by the second half of next year.

Leaked NSA documents have shown that Brazil is the top Latin American target for US spies.

The Brazilian government is also working on developing an encrypted email service for private citizens.

Despite doubts, Minister Paulo Bernardo Silva said the system will be mandatory for federal officials

Categories: Politics, Brazil.

Tags: Brazil, encrypted email service, paulo Bernardo Silva, United States, US cyber-spying, US National Security Agency.

Top Comments

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Captain Poppy
And the Brazilian government was not?
Oct 16th, 2013 - 02:45 pm 0
Conqueror
This is quite hilarious. During the Second World War, the Nazis used a cipher system that the British code-named “Ultra”. It included the so-called “Enigma” electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines. The machine employed a “polyalphabetic substitution cipher”. An indication of the complexity of the ciphers available is that using three rotors out of the available five allowed 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 (158 quintillion) different settings.

But what about now? There is commercially-available password-cracker software applications that can crack virtually any 15-digit password. The essence is finding the “key”. There are a number of methods. And, at the bottom line, there is “force”. The application throws so many options at the “problem” that is overwhelmed. And that is just using an ordinary present-day home computer. Imagine the computer power likely to be available to the NSA.

Back to 1939-45. What helps you crack a cipher system? The number of messages you can intercept and apply your decryption techniques to. Who would use the Nazi Enigma machines? Captains of naval vessels. Commanding officers of army units and Luftwaffe squadrons. The Nazis produced 100,000. And all Brazilian federal officials will have to use its system. As of 1995, the Brazilian government 650,000 civilian personnel. Shouldn't take NSA long.

Oh, and look “The entire system is compromised if any user of an encrypted email sends a message to somebody on an outside program, like Gmail.”
Oct 16th, 2013 - 07:39 pm 0
ChrisR
As I predicted in a previous topic Brazil are making a laughing stock of themselves.

Unless they use a grown up approach all this is doomed to fail.

I am most certainly NOT going to state the real way to tackle this, but it does work and is readily available. Apparently the only way to defeat it is by “force” but you need a supercomputer or a massive parallel system, and time, to do it.
Oct 16th, 2013 - 08:38 pm 0

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