Wikileaks, NSA and a crytpographic cat and mouse game

So we know that certain government agencies are collecting data and we also know that Wikileaks has at least 400Gb of encrypted data (aka. "insurance") now in the public domain.

It is encrypted and no-one knows what's there...right?

Schneier posted on his blog an article about the upcomming cryptopocalypse about an presentation from the Black Hat conference entitled The Factoring Dead:Preparing for the Cryptopocalypse.

Given that we are fairly confident that the NSA has an enormous amount of computing power available to it, but even then probably not enough for a brute force attack on the Wikileak's encrypted data by a few orders of magnitude, they do have some pretty competent mathematicians working in that field and a vast amount of data including a lot of unencrypted originals.

Now, as mathematics starts chipping away as the encryption algorithms themselves the amount of computation and time to decrypt without a key comes dramatically down (it might just take a few billions of years now).

What helps in these scenarios is if you have some knowledge about what the encrypted data contains and its encryption method. If the Wikileaks file contains what it is supposed to contain (whatever that is, but it probably implicates the USA) then we have a head-start towards the decryption. This isn't too far from what Alan Turing and the Bletchley code breakers did.

Furthermore, rarely in the past have we have huge amounts of data to work with...encryption algorithms generate data with extremely high entropy. The point now is that is there enough entropy in 400Gb of encrypted data? Do patterns start emerging at some point? Admittedly even 400Gb is not considered a large amount of data these days.

Furthermore the encryption algorithm used is one approved by the NSA. What if the NSA start matching already encrypted documents they hold against the Wikileaks data? Is there a weakness in the keys? Are there patterns in the encrypted data that are independent of the keys being used? Then there's the interesting idea of a blackdoor in the algorithm too.

So, (tin foil hats on please), one of the things that Wikileaks is then looking forward is accidental disclosure of some information in that release. This might suggest that either NSA has succesfulyl decrypted the data. I'm sure that the NSA aren't that stupid to tell us that but governments are large things and even despite apparently good security practices breaches happen either deliberately or accidentally.

From a game theoretic point of view the best I can come up with at the moment is that any release of information by the NSA will reveal subtle hints about what they can and can not do with regards to their knowledge of encryption algorithms.

Shares in popcorn and publishers of books on game theory just went through the roof. Ultimately it might just be that physics, mathematics and plain old information theory has the last laugh...