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The assurance, delivered by Jacob Applebaum during this months Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Hamburg, Germany, ends months of speculation that the NSA may have found a backdoor into such privacysoftware.

Services like PGP for protecting emails and OTR (off the record) for protecting messaging are pretty safe, agreed experts at CCC, which attracts some of the globes top hacking experts every January.

"PGP and OTR are two ways to keep spies from looking through your stuff," says US activist Applebaum. He said communications protected end to end with these services cannot be read by the NSA. Period.

Options like the SSL encryption protocol can be surmounted though, he said. SSL is used - often by banks and internet retail - to keep prying eyes from seeing which websites are being accessed and whats sent to them.

SSH, used by system administrators to get into other computers and run them, can also be cracked.

Its not clear, though, if the NSA has actually cracked their protocols.

Instead, it seems the US electronic intelligence agency is trying to collect keys so it can crack encrypted communication by other methods.

Thats according to documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, which have been published by German news magazine Der Spiegel.

See original here:
NSA can't crack common encryption software, top hacker concludes