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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday February 25 2014, @09:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the Take-my-data-and-go-home dept.
c0lo writes: "Reuters reports

(Reuters) Brazil and the European Union agreed on Monday to lay an undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza to reduce Brazil's reliance on the United States after Washington spied on Brasilia.

At a summit in Brussels, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said the $185 million cable project was central to "guarantee the neutrality" of the Internet, signaling her desire to shield Brazil's Internet traffic from U.S. surveillance. According to other sources, the construction is scheduled to begin in July.

A joint venture between Brazilian telecoms provider Telebras and Spain's IslaLink Submarine Cables would lay the communications link. Telebras would have a 35 percent stake, IslaLink would have a 45 percent interest and European and Brazilian pension funds could put up the remainder.

So it has come to this"

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 25 2014, @10:00AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Tuesday February 25 2014, @10:00AM (#6520) Homepage Journal

    ... "That's what submarines are for" but some others beat me to it.

    However it would be straightforward to encrypt all the data that passes through the cable.

    Yeah the NSA is good at code cracking, but don't think the europeans don't know how to design a cipher that the NSA cannot crack.

    Most codebreaking isn't actually any kind of mathematical finesse. Go look at the XKCD where they discuss how difficult it would be to crack and encrypted computer, as comparing to beating the computer's owner over the head with a five-dollar wrench.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday February 25 2014, @10:44AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday February 25 2014, @10:44AM (#6535) Journal
    There's more subtlety to it than that. There are lots of well-known cryptographic algorithms that are unbreakable, if implemented perfectly. Unfortunately, it's very very hard to implement a cryptographic algorithm in such a away that it doesn't leak information. For example, most processors will consume subtly more power adding pairs of ones than adding a one and a zero or two zeros. If you can accurately measure the power consumption of a hardware security module that does symmetric crypto, you can persuade it to leak the key by providing it with crafted plaintext and seeing how the power usage fluctuates. Recent techniques have shown that you can remotely measure the power consumption if you're very patient, because it basically boils down to taking a load of samples and doing statistical analysis on them.
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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2014, @11:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2014, @11:59AM (#6555)

      How is that going to work, when the CPU you connect to the bugged cable has no idea about the encryption key?

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by WillR on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:24PM

        by WillR (2012) on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:24PM (#6658)
        It doesn't have to work without the key. Somewhere in the spy tradecraft spectrum between the mundane "slip the janitor $100 to give you five minutes alone with the endpoint hardware" and the fantastic "plot of the next Bourne movie, complete with Hollywood progress bars for installing a backdoor, double-crossing femmes fatales, car chases, and shootouts" lies a way for a sufficiently motivated agency to exfiltrate the keys.