Ah, but that was the beauty of the (putative) NSA hack on the standards process: you only leaked the state of the random number generator to an entity that knew

Ah, but that was the beauty of the (putative) NSA hack on the standards process: you only leaked the state of the random number generator to an entity that knew the factors of the parameter used by Dual_EC_DRBG to feed the algorithm. Using Dual_EC_DRBG was a bit like doing your half of a Diffie-Hellman key exchange with the NSA - with the key exchanged being your internal random-number generator state - to anyone else, this communication is completely impenetrable! Well, until someone else gets sufficient access to the internal NSA IT systems to get hold of the factors themselves of course. And one of the things Snowdon demonstrated to us was just how woefully insecure their internal networks were to a person in the right position. If someone in Snowdon’s position was able to access those keys, then it seems likely that so would other intelligence agencies, but we’ll never know for sure of course. Such hubris. Much decrypt. Thanks NSA!